Morgana ..." said the Parson with a sigh.
"But we're all the better for sighting them, even so. What d'you think
of the suggestion, Ishmael?"

"What? I didn't know there'd been one made."

"That you should be on this new board," said the Parson boldly. "Lord
Luxullyan has had to retire through illness; he himself suggested you
should take his place."

Ishmael was stricken silent for a moment. The idea seemed to him a
little absurd, but Boase and Flynn, both of whom he respected, seemed
alight with enthusiasm. He thought it over as well as he could in a
short space. Perhaps there might be something in it after all. He
remembered his own youth, how, if it had not been for the especial
interest taken in him by the Parson, he, like his brothers, might have
had to be content with the bare elements of reading and writing imbibed
at the local dame school whenever Annie chose they should go. Tom had
been the only one to educate himself further by his own efforts; he
himself, he believed, would never have done as much as Tom. All around
him he saw the children of his tenants growing up in ignorance, too
ill-educated even to respond to his schemes for advancing them, for
their better health and conditions of labour. He knew there was
opposition to this new scheme, that the Parson had come in for a share
of obloquy, and that the parents themselves, in some cases were their
children's enemies. And lastly, in that swift flashing before him of
these thoughts, came the image of Nicky--of Nicky whose intelligence was
daily showing as a brighter thing, whose jolly little presence meant so
much of the future to him, on whom he was building his own life-work as
he had up till now conceived of it. How if it were his Nicky who was
destined never to learn, never to be pulled out of the slough of deadly
content, never to know any of the things that make life rich and the
horizon not only the material one proscribed by locality? The
countryside was full of little Nickies--not so finely dowered by nature,
doubtless thicker of skull and soul, but still little Nickies.... Better
co-workers with Nicky these could be made. For the first time he saw not
only Cloom and his own tenants, but the whole countryside that he knew
so well, growing finer, freer.

And it was all about a school board! An ordinary enough thing now, when
custom has staled it and the many faults in the system have become
visible; but, printing once invented, school boards co