ipening every day for the more material but
impersonal energies involved in helping other people's minds and bodies.
As usual, any measure took far longer to sink in in Cornwall than
up-country, and the Education Bill might for long have remained an empty
sound as far as Penwith was concerned if it had not been for Boase,
Ishmael, and several others of the local gentry. The Nonconformists were
still bitter against it, and there were riots and much heartburning
among the poor. They resented having their children sent to school to
learn more than their parents instead of helping them by earning almost
as soon as their little legs could stagger. Indignation meetings were
held in the local chapels, and the Parson was once stoned from behind a
hedge. He, though by nature a Conservative, was too truly a wise as well
as a compassionate man not to see the crying need for reforms, and
though of necessity he deplored the creeping in of undenominationalism,
yet he knew his parish was too poor to support adequate Church schools,
and he was glad enough to see children in a way to receive some
education. He smiled at the idea of the Bible being "explained" without
a leaning to any particular creed, but he relied on his own Sunday
school to supply that want. Also perhaps even he was not averse to
supporting what had so violently the disapprobation of the
Nonconformists.... There was no particular force in the objections of
these latter in that district, as the Church school, the only one for
miles, would not be large or convenient enough to come under the State
aid of the Bill, so almost from the first it was a matter of building
one of the new Board schools, where the undenominational system abhorred
by Boase would be all that would hold sway.

Ishmael's first definite outward movement came about on an evening when
Boase came up to the Manor to see him and the Flynns, who were staying
with him at the time. Nicky was then three years old, and a daily
growing delight to Ishmael, but the Parson was not without a guileful
plot to wean him somewhat from that allegiance. He had begun to
consider--probably because Daniel Flynn, deeply as he disagreed from him
in many respects, had stirred him to the wider issues--that Ishmael must
be made to take a hand in other affairs than the ordering of his estate
and the upbringing of his son. He had watched with alarm the increasing
inwardness of the man he loved, to him always the boy he remembered--a