e like the floor, and they were scrupulously
scrubbed. The cool tint of the walls was somewhat cheered by coloured
maps and prints, and the school-mistress's chair (an old carved oak one
that had been much revived by bees-wax and turpentine since the miser's
days) stood on the left-hand side of the window--under "Keep Innocency,"
and looking towards "Peace at the last." I know, for when we were all
writing or something of that sort, so that she could sit still, she used
to sit with her hands folded and look up at it, which was what made Jem
and me think of the old white hen that turned up its eyes; and made
Horace Simpson say that he believed she had done one of the letters
wrong, and could not help looking at it to see if it showed. And by the
school-mistress's chair was the lame boy's sofa. It was the very old
sofa covered with newspapers on which I had read about the murder, when
the lawyer was reading the will. But she had taken off the paper, and
covered it with turkey red, and red cushions, and a quilt of brown
holland and red bordering, to hide his crumpled legs, so that he looked
quite comfortable.

I remember so well the first day that he came. His father was a parson
on the moors, and this boy had always wanted to go to school in spite of
his infirmity, and at last his father brought him in a light cart down
from the moors, to look at it; and when he got him out of the cart, he
carried him in. He was a big man, I remember, with grey hair and bent
shoulders, and a very old coat, for it split a little at one of the
seams as he was carrying him in, and we laughed.

When they got into the room, he put the boy down, keeping his arm round
him, and wiped his face and said--"How deliciously cool!"--and the boy
stared all round with his great eyes, and then he lifted them to his
father's face and said--"I'll come here. I do like it. But not to-day,
my back is so bad."

And what makes me know that Horace was wrong, and that Mrs. Wood had
made no mistake about the letters of the text, is that "Cripple
Charlie"--as we called him--could see it so well with lying down. And he
told me one day that when his back was very bad, and he got the fidgets
and could not keep still, he used to fix his eyes on "Peace," which had
gold round the letters, and shone, and that if he could keep steadily to
it, for a good bit, he always fell asleep at the last. But he was very
fanciful, poor chap!

I do not think it was because Jem and I