ptionable reference" left to Snuffy to put
forward.
The Colonel came with a soldier's promptness, and, with the utmost
courtesy of manner, went straight to the point. His life had not
accustomed him to our neighbourly unwillingness to interfere with
anything that did not personally concern us, nor to the prudent patience
with which country folk will wink long at local evils. In the upshot
what he asked was what my mother had asked three years before. Had my
father personal knowledge or good authority for believing the school to
be a well-conducted one, and Mr. Crayshaw a fit man for his responsible
post? Had he ever heard rumours to the man's discredit?
Replies that must do for a wife will not always answer a man who puts
the same questions. My great-grandfather's memory was not evoked on this
occasion, and my father frankly confessed that his personal knowledge of
Crayshaw's was very small, and that the man on whose recommendation he
had sent us to school there had just proved to be a rascal and a
swindler. Our mother had certainly heard rumours of severity, but he had
regarded her maternal anxiety as excessive, etc., etc. In short, my dear
father saw that he had been wrong, and confessed it, and was now as
ready as the Colonel to expose Snuffy's misdeeds.
No elaborate investigation was needed. An attack once made on Mr.
Crayshaw's hollow reputation, it cracked on every side; first hints
crept out, then scandals flew. The Colonel gave no quarter, and he did
not limit his interest to his own nephew.
"A widow's son, ma'am," so he said to my mother, bowing over her hand as
he led her in to dinner, in a style to which we were quite unaccustomed;
"a widow's son, ma'am, should find a father in every honest man who can
assist him."
The tide having turned against Snuffy, his friends (of the Driver and
Quills type) turned with it. But they gained nothing, for one morning he
got up as early as we had done, and ran away, and I never heard of him
again. And before nightfall the neighbours, who had so long tolerated
his wickedness, broke every pane of glass in his windows.
During all this, Lewis Lorraine and his uncle stayed at our house. The
Colonel spent his time between holding indignant investigations, writing
indignant letters (which he allowed us to seal with his huge signet),
and walking backwards and forwards to the town to buy presents for the
little boys.
When Snuffy ran away, and the school was left to its
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