had happily only their writing-books to
show, in various stages of progress from pot-hooks to round text; and
mere pen-strokes, however perverse, were less exasperating to Bartle
than false arithmetic. He was a little more severe than usual on Jacob
Storey's Z's, of which poor Jacob had written a pageful, all with their
tops turned the wrong way, with a puzzled sense that they were not right
"somehow." But he observed in apology, that it was a letter you never
wanted hardly, and he thought it had only been there "to finish off th'
alphabet, like, though ampusand (&) would ha' done as well, for what he
could see."

At last the pupils had all taken their hats and said their
"Good-nights," and Adam, knowing his old master's habits, rose and said,
"Shall I put the candles out, Mr. Massey?"

"Yes, my boy, yes, all but this, which I'll carry into the house; and
just lock the outer door, now you're near it," said Bartle, getting his
stick in the fitting angle to help him in descending from his stool.
He was no sooner on the ground than it became obvious why the stick
was necessary--the left leg was much shorter than the right. But the
school-master was so active with his lameness that it was hardly thought
of as a misfortune; and if you had seen him make his way along the
schoolroom floor, and up the step into his kitchen, you would perhaps
have understood why the naughty boys sometimes felt that his pace might
be indefinitely quickened and that he and his stick might overtake them
even in their swiftest run.

The moment he appeared at the kitchen door with the candle in his
hand, a faint whimpering began in the chimney-corner, and a
brown-and-tan-coloured bitch, of that wise-looking breed with short legs
and long body, known to an unmechanical generation as turnspits, came
creeping along the floor, wagging her tail, and hesitating at every
other step, as if her affections were painfully divided between the
hamper in the chimney-corner and the master, whom she could not leave
without a greeting.

"Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies?" said the schoolmaster,
making haste towards the chimney-corner and holding the candle over
the low hamper, where two extremely blind puppies lifted up their heads
towards the light from a nest of flannel and wool. Vixen could not even
see her master look at them without painful excitement: she got into the
hamper and got out again the next moment, and behaved with true feminine
foll