even know it wasn't the right thing to be a pauper, and that animal ran
up a great wall in our faces so that we couldn't see the grass--curse
him!" Ford had gradually worked himself into a white rage.

"He didn't know any better," said Geisner. "Was he the priest?"

"Yes, the rector, getting L900 a-year and this great house, and paying a
skinny curate L60 for doing the work. A fat impostor, who drove about in
a carriage, and came to tell the girl next door as she lay a-bed that she
would go to hell for her sin and burn there for ever. I hated his wall
and him too. Out in the fields I used to draw him on bits of slate. In
the winter when there weren't any crows or any weeding I went to school.
You see, unless you sent your children to the church school a little, and
went to church regularly, you didn't get any beef or blanket at
Christmas. I tell you English charity is a sweet thing. Well, I used to
draw the parson at school, a fat, pompous, double chinned, pot-bellied
animal, with thin side-whiskers, and a tall silk hat, and a big handful
of a nose. I drew nothing else. I studied the question as it were and I
got so that I could draw the brute in a hundred different ways. You can
imagine they weren't complimentary, and one day the parson came to the
school, and we stood up in class with slates to do sums, and on the back
of my slate was one of the very strongest of my first attempts at
cartooning. It was a hot one." And at the remembrance Ford laughed so
contagiously that they all joined. "The parson happened to see it. By
gum! It was worth everything to see him."

"What did he do?"

"What didn't he do? He delivered a lecture, how I was a worthy relative
of an uncle of mine who'd been shipped out this way years before for
snaring a rabbit, and so on. I got nearly skinned alive, and the
Christmas beef and blanket wore stopped from our folks. And there another
joke comes in. An older brother of mine, 14 years old, I was about 12,
took to going to the Ranters' meetings instead of to church. My mother
and father used to tie him up on Saturday nights and march him to church
on Sunday like a young criminal going to gaol. They were afraid of losing
the beef and blanket, you see. He sometimes ran out of church when they
nodded or weren't looking, and the curate was always worrying them about
him. It was the deadliest of all sins, you know, to go to the Ranters.
Well, when the beef and blanket were stopped, without any chance