The school-master (as we used to call him) had seen and suffered so much more of life than we, that I do not think he resented the clumsiness of our sympathy; but now I look back I fancy that he must have felt as if he wanted years of peace and quiet in which to try and forget the years of suffering. Old Isaac said one day, "I reckon the master feels as if he wanted to sit down and say to hisself over and over again, 'I'm a free man, I'm a free man, I'm a free man,' till he can fair trust himself to believe it." Isaac was probably right, and perhaps evening parties, though they are meant for treats, are not the best places to sit down and feel free in, particularly when there are a lot of strange people who have heard a dreadful story about you, and want to see what you look like after it. During the summer holidays Jem and I were out the whole day long. When we came in I was ready for the Penny Numbers, but Jem always fell asleep, even if he did not go to bed at once. My father did just the same. I think their feeling about houses was of a perfectly primitive kind. They looked upon them as comfortable shelter for sleeping and eating, but not at all as places in which to pursue any occupation. Life, for them, was lived out-of-doors. I know now how dull this must have made the evenings for my mother, and that it was very selfish of me to wait till my father was asleep (for fear he should say "no"), and then to ask her leave to take the Penny Numbers down to the farm and sit with Cripple Charlie. Now and then she would go too, and chat with Mrs. Wood, whilst the school-master and I were turning the terrestrial globe by Charlie's sofa; but as a rule Charlie and I were alone, and the Woods went round the homestead together, and came home hand in hand, through the garden, and we laughed to think how we had taken him for a tramp. And sometimes on a summer's evening, when we talked and read aloud to each other across a quaint oak table that had been the miser's, of far-away lands and strange birds of gorgeous plumage, the school-master sat silent in the arm-chair by the open lattice, resting his white head against the mullion that the ivy was creeping up, and listened to the blackbirds and thrushes as their songs dropped by odd notes into silence, and gazed at the near fields and trees, and the little homestead with its hayricks on the hill, when the grass was apple-green in the gold mist of sunset: and went on gazing when that had faded into fog, and the hedgerow elms were black against the sky, as if the eye could not be filled with seeing, nor the ear with hearing! CHAPTER VI. "Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, Turns his necessity to glorious gain." WORDSWORTH. "Jack," said Charlie, "listen!"