thirteen
almshouses, and had endowed two scholarships at Oxford, the object of
ambition of the Stoneborough boys, every eighteen months.

There were about sixty or seventy boarders, and the town boys slept at
home, and spent their weekly holiday there on Saturday--the happiest
day in the week to the May family, when alone, they had the company at
dinner of Norman and Harry, otherwise known by their school names of
June and July, given them because their elder brother had begun the
series of months as May.

Some two hundred years back, a Dr. Thomas May had been headmaster, but
ever since that time there had always been an M. D., not a D. D., in
the family, owning a comfortable demesne of spacious garden, and field
enough for two cows, still green and intact, among modern buildings and
improvements.

The present Dr. May stood very high in his profession, and might soon
have made a large fortune in London, had he not held fast to his
home attachments. He was extremely skilful and clever, with a boyish
character that seemed as if it could never grow older; ardent,
sensitive, and heedless, with a quickness of sympathy and tenderness of
heart that was increased, rather than blunted, by exercise in scenes of
suffering.

At the end of the previous summer holidays, Dr. May had been called one
morning to attend a gentleman who had been taken very ill, at the Swan
Inn.

He was received by a little boy of ten years old, in much grief,
explaining that his brother had come two days ago from London, to bring
him to school here; he had seemed unwell ever since they met, and last
night had become much worse. And extremely ill the doctor found him;
a youth of two or three and twenty, suffering under a severe attack of
fever, oppressed, and scarcely conscious, so as quite to justify his
little brother's apprehensions. He advised the boy to write to his
family, but was answered by a look that went to his heart--"Alan"
was all he had in the world--father and mother were dead, and their
relations lived in Scotland, and were hardly known to them.

"Where have you been living, then?"

"Alan sent me to school at Miss Lawler's when my mother died, and there
I have been ever since, while he has been these three years and a half
on the African station."

"What, is he in the navy?"

"Yes," said the boy proudly, "Lieutenant Ernescliffe. He got his
promotion last week. My father was in the battle of Trafalgar; and
Alan has been three ye