er as
became George Osborne's son, and to defray the expenses of the little
school to which, after much misgiving and reluctance and many secret
pangs and fears on her own part, she had been induced to send the lad.
She had sat up of nights conning lessons and spelling over crabbed
grammars and geography books in order to teach them to Georgy. She had
worked even at the Latin accidence, fondly hoping that she might be
capable of instructing him in that language. To part with him all day,
to send him out to the mercy of a schoolmaster's cane and his
schoolfellows' roughness, was almost like weaning him over again to
that weak mother, so tremulous and full of sensibility. He, for his
part, rushed off to the school with the utmost happiness. He was
longing for the change. That childish gladness wounded his mother, who
was herself so grieved to part with him. She would rather have had him
more sorry, she thought, and then was deeply repentant within herself
for daring to be so selfish as to wish her own son to be unhappy.

Georgy made great progress in the school, which was kept by a friend of
his mother's constant admirer, the Rev. Mr. Binny. He brought home
numberless prizes and testimonials of ability. He told his mother
countless stories every night about his school-companions: and what a
fine fellow Lyons was, and what a sneak Sniffin was, and how Steel's
father actually supplied the meat for the establishment, whereas
Golding's mother came in a carriage to fetch him every Saturday, and
how Neat had straps to his trowsers--might he have straps?--and how
Bull Major was so strong (though only in Eutropius) that it was
believed he could lick the Usher, Mr. Ward, himself. So Amelia learned
to know every one of the boys in that school as well as Georgy himself,
and of nights she used to help him in his exercises and puzzle her
little head over his lessons as eagerly as if she was herself going in
the morning into the presence of the master. Once, after a certain
combat with Master Smith, George came home to his mother with a black
eye, and bragged prodigiously to his parent and his delighted old
grandfather about his valour in the fight, in which, if the truth was
known he did not behave with particular heroism, and in which he
decidedly had the worst. But Amelia has never forgiven that Smith to
this day, though he is now a peaceful apothecary near Leicester Square.

In these quiet labours and harmless cares the g