parkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated
kitchen-garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned canal, and disorder of
frowziness and fog. As if the child had given the table a kick, and gone
to sleep.

But, even among school-buildings, school-teachers, and school-pupils,
all according to pattern and all engendered in the light of the latest
Gospel according to Monotony, the older pattern into which so many
fortunes have been shaped for good and evil, comes out. It came out in
Miss Peecher the schoolmistress, watering her flowers, as Mr Bradley
Headstone walked forth. It came out in Miss Peecher the schoolmistress,
watering the flowers in the little dusty bit of garden attached to her
small official residence, with little windows like the eyes in needles,
and little doors like the covers of school-books.

Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher;
cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little
housewife, a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and
weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one. She could write
a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the
left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the
other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule. If Mr Bradley
Headstone had addressed a written proposal of marriage to her, she would
probably have replied in a complete little essay on the theme exactly a
slate long, but would certainly have replied Yes. For she loved him. The
decent hair-guard that went round his neck and took care of his decent
silver watch was an object of envy to her. So would Miss Peecher have
gone round his neck and taken care of him. Of him, insensible. Because
he did not love Miss Peecher.

Miss Peecher's favourite pupil, who assisted her in her little
household, was in attendance with a can of water to replenish her little
watering-pot, and sufficiently divined the state of Miss Peecher's
affections to feel it necessary that she herself should love young
Charley Hexam. So, there was a double palpitation among the double
stocks and double wall-flowers, when the master and the boy looked over
the little gate.

'A fine evening, Miss Peecher,' said the Master.

'A very fine evening, Mr Headstone,' said Miss Peecher. 'Are you taking
a walk?'

'Hexam and I are going to take a long walk.'

'Charming weather,' remarked Miss Peecher, FOR a long walk.'

'Ours is rather on busi