Page:The Small House at Allington Vol 2.djvu/251

known the family for years, had been humbly solicited, the widow almost kneeling before him with tears, to take Johnny by the hand and make a clerk of him; but the attorney had discovered that Master Johnny Eames was not supposed to be sharp, and would have none of him. During those days, those gawky, gainless, unadmired days, in which he had wandered about the lanes of Guestwick as his only amusement, and had composed hundreds of rhymes in honour of Lily Dale which no human eye but his own had ever seen, he had come to regard himself as almost a burden upon the earth. Nobody seemed to want him. His own mother was very anxious; but her anxiety seemed to him to indicate a continual desire to get rid of him. For hours upon hours he would fill his mind with castles in the air, dreaming of wonderful successes in the midst of which Lily Dale always reigned as a queen. He would carry on the same story in his imagination from month to month, almost contenting himself with such ideal happiness. Had it not been for the possession of that power, what comfort could there have been to him in his life? There are lads of seventeen who can find happiness in study, who can busy themselves in books and be at their ease among the creations of other minds. These are they who afterwards become well-informed men. It was not so with John Eames. He had never been studious. The perusal of a novel was to him in those days a slow affair; and of poetry he read but little, storing up accurately in his memory all that he did read. But he created for himself his own romance, though to the eye a most unromantic youth; and he wandered through the Guestwick woods with many thoughts of which they who knew him best knew nothing. All this he thought of now as, with devious steps, he made his way towards his old home;—with very devious steps, for he went backwards through the woods by a narrow path which led right away from the town down to a little water-course, over which stood a wooden foot-bridge with a rail. He stood on the centre of the plank, at a spot which he knew well, and rubbing his hand upon the rail, cleansed it for the space of a few inches of the vegetable growth produced by the spray of the water. There, rudely carved in the wood, was still the word LILY. When he cut those letters she had been almost a child. "I wonder whether she will come here with me and let me show it to her," he said to himself. Then he took out his knife and cleared the cuttings of the letters, and having done so, leaned upon the rail, and looked down upon the running water. How well things in the world had gone for him! How well! And