She put her hand on his shoulder. Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar sometimes demonstrated affection. "And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work." Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class held of their rulers and their education. CHAPTER XI THE STUDY Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school in the hollow between the church and Rodmill. New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot, where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will. Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel. Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably. The boys attended both. Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in particular. As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he didn't care to use them. "He's a little gentleman though--like his father," ended the schoolmaster. Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us. As an honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while money was very little to him. But for the mysterious quality of breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence of something finer than ourselves. And on the rare occasions in which Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice--"There's English for you! Don't you wish you could talk like that...?" Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it never failed to do. "That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly. "But Ern's got to make his own way in the world." "He'll do," said Mr. Pigott. "He won't be forgotten, you'll see. He's a good lad, and that's something even in these days." And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he excelled. Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike him in his marked athletic capacity. True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was disliked by everybody and gloried in it. He won all the gilt-edged prizes, while Ern took the canings. Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home. "Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening. "They fairly sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"