drunk on the premises.” The inn, where hung the sign of the Golden Lion—a prodigious animal with a mane of startling brilliancy—was a modern building of brick, and apparently the only one in decent repair. Near it stood the school-house in a dilapidated state, and contrasting painfully with its neighbour. Tom had heard the church clock strike four as he came up to it, and in a moment out rushed a swarm of children: boys, girls, and infants. He watched them with keen interest. They were the soil in which he was to plant seeds, to weed, to reap—God granting it—the harvest of reward. Half a dozen boys a little older than the rest were in loud turmoil. From the midst of the group Tom heard a rattling noise, then a groan: and a cry of “Shame to knock down Jemmy Bates!” broke from the rest. A boy, about ten years of age, evidently a cripple—for a little pair of crutches had rolled away into a ditch—lay on the ground, unable to rise. In another moment, just as Tom had almost succeeded in reaching him, he was rescued by a woman’s hand, with the fond foolish words which will serve as a panacea for half the woes of childhood till the end of time. Tom turned to the speaker. She had a care-worn look, and was almost shabbily dressed; but she had a profusion of fair hair, and large grey eyes, whose expression atoned for waning youth and freshness. The children made way for her eagerly, and Jemmy Bates himself seemed thankful to be near her even at the cost of his bruises. The boy who had knocked him down slunk away.
“Now Jemmy,” she said, “we will go home together, and to-morrow you shall wait for me. I dare say it was carelessness; no one would be so cruel as to hit you a blow on purpose.”
“Oh, yes, Miss Letitia; I saw him!” was the general cry. “I did!” and “I did!” “And I am afraid I did,” said Tom, who had raised his hat to Miss Letitia, and walked on by her side.
“Are you Mr. Morland?” she asked. “Then do not judge of the boys by this unlucky incident. They are good on the whole; but the schoolmaster has lately suffered much from ill-health, and they have been for some time without the personal superintendence of a clergyman. Altogether, circumstances have been against them.”
Tom said truly that children good, bad, or indifferent were always an object of interest to him. He had been watching poor little Jemmy Bates limping painfully by his side, and somewhat to the boy’s astonishment he took him up in his arms and carried him along. The distance was soon accomplished. Tom deposited his burden in his mother’s cottage, and was overwhelmed with her thanks. Miss Letitia having pointed out to him the nearest way to the rectory, went on her way, and another half-mile brought him to his journey’s end. The house which was henceforward to be his dwelling-place was before him. It was one story high, with lattice windows, and a porch, over which grew honeysuckles and roses in the wildest luxuriance. An unsparing hand had planted half-a-dozen sorts of climbers beneath the windows; one of these had served as a trellis to another, and so on, till the whole front of the house was in a tangle of foliage. In front was a little grass-plot: no scythe had touched its growth for months, and the gravel path that ran round it was almost choked with weeds. It was a neglected spot.
Tom had bought the household furniture of the executors of the late incumbent, and an elderly woman, who had been left in charge of the house, was engaged by him as his housekeeper. His Lares and Penates were thus already set up. To be enabled to form some idea of the work Tom had before him, it will be necessary to revert to a period sixteen years antecedent to his entering on the living. The rector of Beauchamp was, at that time, named Nevil. He was a widower, with one daughter. She was scarcely seventeen years of age, but she had been her father’s almoner, sick-nurse, and school-teacher from childhood. Her education had been built upon his theories, and the result had made her, in some measure, different from other girls. She gave all her energies to assist him in the care of the parish, making no friends in her own class of life. When his death occurred suddenly, she found herself alone in the world. An old fellow-collegian of her father represented her case to a charitable fund, which conferred a small annuity upon her, and Letitia Nevil settled down in the place which circumstances had endeared to her, on an income of fifteen pounds a year; her skill in needlework, and her industry in various ways, supplying whatever her need required beyond that amount. The new rector, Mr. Nugent, was an elderly man of good family—handsome, eloquent, and agreeable. His wife, who was the daughter of a spendthrift Irish peer, died soon after his arrival in the parish; and his only son, on leaving college, was placed in the office of Mr. Wortleby, the solicitor at Chanleigh. George Nugent was like his father in person, careless and extravagant as the elder man was also. Mr. Nugent’s debts had accumulated with his years, but they never sat heavily on his shoulders, like the old man of the sea, as they do on many others; for when his creditors were pressing, he packed up his travelling bags and went to Paris or Brussels till they became weary, or resigned to the hopelessness of their case. He was always expecting windfalls. When they came—as they sometimes did—he lived gaily at Beauchamp, giving pleasant little dinners to the sprightliest people he could get together; never troubling himself with parish work, preaching effectively what he seldom attempted to practice, and never striving to restrain his son in the downward course in which he had walked from his boyhood upwards. Three years passed on thus. Suddenly the news spread like wildfire in Chanleigh and Beauchamp that George Nugent had left Mr. Wortleby’s office overnight, and had taken his passage in a vessel that sailed on the following morning for Australia. Was his father acquainted with his movements? Nobody ever knew; nobody demurred when he stated his inability to meet his son’s debts; nobody wondered at his evasion of the just demands on his time, his energy, or his income. An affection of the lungs was a sufficient excuse to the Bishop of the diocese for Mr. Nugent’s residence in the south of France