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.
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