ved
with my uncle in London; he kept a ham and beef shop, and had thirteen
or fourteen youngsters of his own to bring up. He was going to put me to
the butchering, but I settled all that myself. I ran away."

"You ran away?" asked John breathlessly, and regarding the old man with
more interest than he had ever given him yet.

"Ay! When I was no older than you. Half a crown I had in my pocket, I
remember. It was all the start in life _I_ ever got."

John put down his spoon and stared at his grandfather earnestly,
eagerly, admiringly.

"You're a self-made man!" he said. And old as the Captain was, and young
as was his admirer, he warmed pleasantly at the words.

"Ay!" he said exultingly, "I'm a self-made man right enough. Every bit
of me! I started life as an errand boy in the London slums, and it
seemed for a time as if I was going to die an errand boy in the London
slums. At least, it might have seemed so to most people. _I'd_ made up
my mind how it was to be, how it had got to be."

"What did you do?" asked John eagerly.

"Do--well, I had about a year at errand running and then I got a chance
to go to sea, and I took it. I went first to China. By gad, how well I
remember that trip!"

And forthwith he launched into a sea-story more enthralling by far to
the boy than any in that library so stocked with sea-stories.

At dinner again, at night, the talk was the same. The usually silent
ruminative old man was positively loquacious, and John gave him a rapt
attention.

When nine o'clock struck a dim remembrance come to the boy that he was
still a pupil of Wygate School and had home tasks to prepare for the
morrow.

But he had slipped too far out of his groove to go back again that
night.

He began to wander in and out of the lower floor rooms; out of the front
door, round the verandah, and in by the French windows to the
dining-room.

"I'll chuck school," he said. "Catch any of those self-made men going to
school when they were thirteen. I'll have to struggle and screw and put
myself to a night-school. That's what they did. A self-made man is good
enough for me."

CHAPTER XI

THE ARTIST BY THE WAYSIDE

Elizabeth Bruce was "detained for inattention."

No one else out of all the four and thirty scholars of Wygate School was
kept in to-day. One after the other, hands folded behind them, they had
marched to the door. Then delightful sounds--the scuffling of feet,
stifled screams, gigglings and low