But now the last wild rose of the summer has blushed in the hedgerows, and the bracken of the moors is greying to sickly death; the brooks and rivulets fall from the heights in fuller stream and muttering a gloomier song and the long nights are at hand when men-folk of a social mind seek the creature comforts and the good-fellowship of taproom and bar. And this was the season which Ben and Tom deemed fitting for the launching of still another experiment. They had resolved of a Saturday night--that most dangerous of nights, when the wages in the breeches' pockets seem as if they would stand any inroad for the quenching pint throughout the winter months to have night classes at the mills for their own hands, and for as many of their friends as liked to come. There were to be first of all lessons in English History, and with history was to be taught in the only way it can be effectively taught, the geography of the wide, wide world. And the lessons in history were to be enlivened and made the more seductive by the reading of books of fiction and romance, of fable and poem dealing with the period under study, so that by the light of such heroes as _Hereward the Wake_, and _The Last of the Saxon Kings_, and _The Last of the Barons_, by the deathless pages of Avon's Swan, by the muse of Chaucer, of Spenser, and of Milton, the ages of the past lived before the eyes of these eager sons of toil, and they dwelt in the stately company of kings and warriors, cloistered saints and beautiful sinners, and saw, as in a waking dream, the stately drama of their country's making.