ted boy Peter, from the cottage by the
water-trough. At first Philip lost, and with grunts of satisfaction
the big ones promptly pocketed their gains. Then Philip won, and little
curly Peter was stripped naked, and his lip began to fall. At that
Philip paused, held his head aside, and considered, and then said quite
briskly, "Peter hadn't a fair chance that time--here, let's give him
another go."

The father's throat swelled, and he went indoors to the mother and said,
"I think--perhaps I'm to blame--but somehow I think our boy isn't
like other boys. What do you say? Foolish? May be so, may be so! No
difference? Well, no--no!"

But deep down in the secret place of his heart, Thomas Wilson Christian,
broken man, uprooted tree, wrecked craft in the mud and slime, began to
cherish a fond idea. The son would regain all that his father had lost!
He had gifts, and he should be brought up to the law; a large nature,
and he should be helped to develop it; a fine face which all must
love, a sense of justice, and a great wealth of the power of radiating
happiness. Deemster? Why not? Ballawhaine? Who could tell? The biggest,
noblest, greatest of all Manxmen! God knows!

Only--only he must be taught to fly from his father's dangers. Love?
Then let him love where he can also respect--but never outside his own
sphere. The island was too little for that. To love and to despise was
to suffer the torments of the damned.

Nourishing these dreams, the poor man began to be tortured by every
caress the mother gave her son, and irritated by every word she spoke to
him. Her grammar was good enough for himself, and the exuberant caresses
of her maudlin moods were even sometimes pleasant, but the boy must be
degraded by neither.

The woman did not reach to these high thoughts, but she was not slow to
interpret the casual byplay in which they found expression. Her husband
was taiching her son to dis-respeck her. She wouldn't have thought it
of him--she wouldn't really. But it was always the way when a
plain practical woman married on the quality. Imperence and
dis-respeck--that's the capers! Imperence and disrespeck from the
ones that's doing nothing and behoulden to you for everything. It was
shocking! It was disthressing!

In such outbursts would her jealousy taunt him with his poverty, revile
him for his idleness, and square accounts with him for the manifest
preference of the boy. He could bear them with patience when they were
alone