“Well, it knocked respect for constituted authority out of me.  I didn’t know enough to understand the wrong of one lazy idler having this splendid place while the people he lived on kennelled in hovels.  But it struck me as so villainously selfish to build that wall, to prevent us outside from even looking at the beautiful lawn and flowers.  I was only a little chap but I recollect wondering if it would hurt the place to let me look, and when I couldn’t see that it would I began to hate the wall like poison.  There we were, poor, ragged, hungry wretches, without anything beautiful in our lives, so miserable and hopeless that I didn’t even know it wasn’t the right thing to be a pauper, and that animal ran up a great wall in our faces so that we couldn’t see the grass—­curse him!” Ford had gradually worked himself into a white rage.

“He didn’t know any better,” said Geisner.  “Was he the priest?”

“Yes, the rector, getting L900 a-year and this great house, and paying a skinny curate L60 for doing the work.  A fat impostor, who drove about in a carriage, and came to tell the girl next door as she lay a-bed that she would go to hell for her sin and burn there for ever.  I hated his wall and him too.  Out in the fields I used to draw him on bits of slate.  In the winter when there weren’t any crows or any weeding I went to school.  You see, unless you sent your children to the church school a little, and went to church regularly, you didn’t get any beef or blanket at Christmas.  I tell you English charity is a sweet thing.  Well, I used to draw the parson at school, a fat, pompous, double chinned, pot-bellied animal, with thin side-whiskers, and a tall silk hat, and a big handful of a nose.  I drew nothing else.  I studied the question as it were and I got so that I could draw the brute in a hundred different ways.  You can imagine they weren’t complimentary, and one day the parson came to the school, and we stood up in class with slates to do sums, and on the back of my slate was one of the very strongest of my first attempts at cartooning.  It was a hot one.”  And at the remembrance Ford laughed so contagiously that they all joined.  “The parson happened to see it.  By gum!  It was worth everything to see him.”

“What did he do?”

“What didn’t he do?  He delivered a lecture, how I was a worthy relative of an uncle of mine who’d been shipped out this way years before for snaring a rabbit, and so on.  I got nearly skinned alive, and the Christmas beef and blanket wore stopped from our folks.  And there another joke comes in.  An older brother of mine, 14 years old, I was about 12, took to going to the Ranters’ meetings instead of to church.  My mother and father used to tie him up on Saturday nights and march him to church on Sunday like a young criminal going to gaol.  They were afraid of losing the beef and blanket, you see.  He sometimes ran out of church when they nodded or weren’t looking, and the curate was always worrying them about him.  It was the deadliest of all sins, you know, to go to the Ranters.  Well, when the beef and blanket were stopped, without any chance of forgiveness, we all went to the Ranters.”