Page:A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875).djvu/197

Rh cupboard in some dusky corner, and rummaged out a heap of childish playthings,—tin soldiers and torn story-books, jack-knives and Chinese puzzles. This is what we remembered, between us.

He had made but a short stay at school,—not because he was tormented, for he thought it so fine to be at school at all that he held his tongue at home about the sufferings incurred through the medicine bottle; but because his father thought he was learning bad manners. This he imparted to me in confidence at the time, and I remember how it increased my oppressive awe of Mr. Pickering, who had appeared to me, in glimpses, as a sort of high-priest of the proprieties. Mr. Pickering was a widower,—a fact which seemed to produce in him a sort of preternatural concentration of parental dignity. He was a majestic man, with a hooked nose, a keen, dark eye, very large whiskers, and notions of his own as to how a boy—or his boy, at any rate—should be brought up. First and foremost, he was to be a "gentleman"; which seemed to mean, chiefly, that he was always to wear a muffler and gloves, and be sent to bed, after a supper of bread and milk, at eight o'clock. School-life, on experiment, seemed hostile to these observances, and Eugene was taken home again, to be moulded into urbanity beneath the parental eye. A tutor was