e to each other, waiting to be alone,
and after Hughie had gone to his room his mother talked long with him,
but when Mr. Craven, on his way to bed, heard the low, quiet tones of
the mother's voice through the shut door, he knew it was not to Hughie
she was speaking, and the smile upon his face lost a little of its
cynicism.

Next day there was no smile when he stood with Hughie under the
birch-tree, watching the lad hew flat one side, but gravely enough he
took the paper on which Hughie had written, "Fido, Sept. 13th, 18--,"
saying as he did so, "I shall cut this for you. It is good to remember
brave deeds."

CHAPTER XI

JOHN CRAVEN'S METHOD

Mr. John Craven could not be said to take his school-teaching seriously;
and indeed, any one looking at his face would hardly expect him to take
anything seriously, and certainly those who in his college days followed
and courted and kept pace with Jack Craven, and knew his smile, would
have expected from him anything other than seriousness. He appeared
to himself to be enacting a kind of grim comedy, exile as he was in a
foreign land, among people of a strange tongue.

He knew absolutely nothing of pedagogical method, and consequently he
ignored all rules and precedents in the teaching and conduct of the
school. His discipline was of a most fantastic kind. He had a feeling
that all lessons were a bore, therefore he would assign the shortest and
easiest of tasks. But having assigned the tasks, he expected perfection
in recitation, and impressed his pupils with the idea that nothing less
would pass. His ideas of order were of the loosest kind, and hence the
noise at times was such that even the older pupils found it unbearable;
but when the hour for recitation came, somehow a deathlike stillness
fell upon the school, and the unready shivered with dread apprehension.
And yet he never thrashed the boys; but his fear lay upon them, for his
eyes held the delinquent with such an intensity of magnetic, penetrating
power that the unhappy wretch felt as if any kind of calamity might
befall him.

When one looked at John Craven's face, it was the eyes that caught and
held the attention. They were black, without either gleam or glitter,
indeed almost dull--a lady once called them "smoky eyes." They looked,
under lazy, half-drooping lids, like things asleep, except in moments
of passion, when there appeared, far down, a glowing fire, red and
terrible. At such moments it seemed as