valor,
courtesy, and truly noble qualities which he showed forth in his most
eventful life) chosen by me as the hero and centre of this story,
was not, saving for his good looks, by any means what would be called
now-a-days an "interesting" youth, still less a "highly educated" one;
for, with the exception of a little Latin, which had been driven into
him by repeated blows, as if it had been a nail, he knew no books
whatsoever, save his Bible, his Prayer-book, the old "Mort d'Arthur" of
Caxton's edition, which lay in the great bay window in the hall, and the
translation of "Las Casas' History of the West Indies," which lay beside
it, lately done into English under the title of "The Cruelties of the
Spaniards." He devoutly believed in fairies, whom he called pixies; and
held that they changed babies, and made the mushroom rings on the downs
to dance in. When he had warts or burns, he went to the white witch
at Northam to charm them away; he thought that the sun moved round the
earth, and that the moon had some kindred with a Cheshire cheese.
He held that the swallows slept all the winter at the bottom of the
horse-pond; talked, like Raleigh, Grenville, and other low persons,
with a broad Devonshire accent; and was in many other respects so very
ignorant a youth, that any pert monitor in a national school might have
had a hearty laugh at him. Nevertheless, this ignorant young savage,
vacant of the glorious gains of the nineteenth century, children's
literature and science made easy, and, worst of all, of those improved
views of English history now current among our railway essayists, which
consist in believing all persons, male and female, before the year 1688,
and nearly all after it, to have been either hypocrites or fools, had
learnt certain things which he would hardly have been taught just now
in any school in England; for his training had been that of the old
Persians, "to speak the truth and to draw the bow," both of which savage
virtues he had acquired to perfection, as well as the equally savage
ones of enduring pain cheerfully, and of believing it to be the finest
thing in the world to be a gentleman; by which word he had been taught
to understand the careful habit of causing needless pain to no human
being, poor or rich, and of taking pride in giving up his own pleasure
for the sake of those who were weaker than himself. Moreover, having
been entrusted for the last year with the breaking of a colt, and the
care