These Sunday excursions did not drop with the sere autumnal leaves. A crisp clear day called them forth surely as sunshine had done, Jabez mounting pick-a-back on the shoulders of Simon or Matt when his little feet could no longer keep up their trot beside the bigger Cooper boys. Frames were invigorated, cheerfulness came back to face and home, and Simon, who had a deep-seated love of Nature in his soul, finding her so good a physician, kept up the acquaintance through rounding seasons and years. And from Nature he drew lessons which he dropped as seed into the boy’s heart, as unconscious of the great work he was doing as was Jabez himself. The boy throve and grew hardy. Companionship with older and rougher lads, sturdy fellows with wills of their own, made him sturdy too; a lad who would take a blow and give one on occasion; who would run a race and lose, and a second, and third, until he could win. But Bessy’s gentle training was something very different from Sal’s, and Jabez grew up tender as well as strong and bold. A persecuted kitten had taken refuge under Bessy’s batting-frame in the foundling’s go-cart days, and in care for that kitten, and for a wounded brown linnet brought home one Sunday, he learned humanity. Matthew’s lads were given to bird-nesting, and Matt himself saw no harm in it; but when that young linnet’s wing was broken in a scuffle for the nest stolen from a clump of brushwood, Simon read the robbers such a homily they had never heard in their young lives, and as a corollary he took the bird home to be fed and nursed by Bess and Jabez till it could fly, an event which never came about. In hot weather the lads pulled off clogs and stockings (there were no trousers to turn up—they wore breeches), and waded into pools and brooks, and Jabez would be no whit behind. On one of these occasions, either the current was too strong for the venturesome child, or the gravel slipped from under his feet, or his companions pushed him—no matter which,—but in he went, and, but for the presence of Simon, would have been drowned. Simon had been born on the river-banks, and could swim like a fish. At once he resolved that Jabez should learn to do the same, and begin at once. “Yo’ see, Bess, if aw hadna bin theer he’d a bin dreawnded, sure as wayter’s wet, an’ th’ third toime pays off fur o’; so he mun larn to tak’ care on himsel’ th’ next toime he marlocks [gambols] among th’ Jack-sharps.” Jabez was not six years old when Simon Clegg gave him and the young Coopers their first lesson in swimming, in a delightful and sequestered part of Smedley Vale, where the Irk was clear and bright. He had shown them, nearer home, how a frog used its limbs, and then, after a few preliminary evolutions, to show how a man used his, took the lad on his back, and, after swimming with him awhile shook him off into the water to flounder about for himself.