SCHOOL DAYS
with his young charge in tow, in monstrous good-humor with himself and all the world.
It is needless, and would be impertinent, to tell how the two young boys were received in that drawing-room. The lady who presided there is still living, and has carried with her to her peaceful home in the North the respect and love of all those who ever felt and shared that gentle and high-bred hospitality. Ay, many is the brave heart now doing its work and bearing its load in country curacies, London chambers, under the Indian sun, and in Australian towns and clearings, which looks back with fond and grateful memory to that School-house drawing-room, and dates much of its highest and best training to the lessons learned there.
Besides Mrs. Arnold and one or two of the elder children, there were one of the younger masters, young Brooke—who was now in the sixth, and had succeeded to his brother's position and influence—and another sixth-form boy there, talking together before the fire. The master and young Brooke, now a great, strapping fellow six feet high, eighteen years old, and powerful as a coal-heaver, nodded kindly to Tom, to his intense glory, and then went on talking; the other did not notice them. The hostess, after a few kind words, which led the boys at once and insensibly to feel at their ease, and to begin talking to each other, left them with her own children while she finished a letter. The young ones got on fast and well, Tom holding forth about a prodigious pony he had been riding out hunting, and hearing stories of the winter glories of the lakes, when tea came in, and immediately after the Doctor himself.
How frank and kind and manly was his greeting to the party by the fire! It did Tom's heart good to see him and young Brooke shake hands, and look each other in the face; and he didn't fail to remark that Brooke was nearly as tall and quite as broad as the Doctor. And his cup was full, when in another moment his master turned to him with another warm shake of the hand,
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