s chance to send me also.

But before I say a word about this school, I shall go back to where I
should have begun, and give you a hint as to who I am; for it may be
that these words of mine may be read by some folk beyond the border
country who never heard of the Calders of West Inch.

It has a brave sound, West Inch, but it is not a fine estate with a
braw house upon it, but only a great hard-bitten, wind-swept sheep run,
fringing off into links along the sea-shore, where a frugal man might
with hard work just pay his rent and have butter instead of treacle on
Sundays. In the centre there is a grey-stoned slate-roofed house with a
byre behind it, and "1703" scrawled in stonework over the lintel of the
door. There for more than a hundred years our folk have lived, until,
for all their poverty, they came to take a good place among the people;
for in the country parts the old yeoman is often better thought of than
the new laird.

There was one queer thing about the house of West Inch. It has been
reckoned by engineers and other knowing folk that the boundary line
between the two countries ran right through the middle of it, splitting
our second-best bedroom into an English half and a Scotch half. Now the
cot in which I always slept was so placed that my head was to the north
of the line and my feet to the south of it. My friends say that if I
had chanced to lie the other way my hair might not have been so sandy,
nor my mind of so solemn a cast. This I know, that more than once in my
life, when my Scotch head could see no way out of a danger, my good
thick English legs have come to my help, and carried me clear away.
But at school I never heard the end of this, for they would call me
"Half-and-half" and "The Great Britain," and sometimes "Union Jack."
When there was a battle between the Scotch and English boys, one side
would kick my shins and the other cuff my ears, and then they would both
stop and laugh as though it were something funny.

At first I was very miserable at the Berwick Academy. Birtwhistle was
the first master, and Adams the second, and I had no love for either of
them. I was shy and backward by nature, and slow at making a friend
either among masters or boys. It was nine miles as the crow flies, and
eleven and a half by road, from Berwick to West Inch, and my heart grew
heavy at the weary distance that separated me from my mother; for, mark
you, a lad of that age pretends that he has no need