“What?  I didn’t know there’d been one made.”

“That you should be on this new board,” said the Parson boldly.  “Lord Luxullyan has had to retire through illness; he himself suggested you should take his place.”

Ishmael was stricken silent for a moment.  The idea seemed to him a little absurd, but Boase and Flynn, both of whom he respected, seemed alight with enthusiasm.  He thought it over as well as he could in a short space.  Perhaps there might be something in it after all.  He remembered his own youth, how, if it had not been for the especial interest taken in him by the Parson, he, like his brothers, might have had to be content with the bare elements of reading and writing imbibed at the local dame school whenever Annie chose they should go.  Tom had been the only one to educate himself further by his own efforts; he himself, he believed, would never have done as much as Tom.  All around him he saw the children of his tenants growing up in ignorance, too ill-educated even to respond to his schemes for advancing them, for their better health and conditions of labour.  He knew there was opposition to this new scheme, that the Parson had come in for a share of obloquy, and that the parents themselves, in some cases were their children’s enemies.  And lastly, in that swift flashing before him of these thoughts, came the image of Nicky—­of Nicky whose intelligence was daily showing as a brighter thing, whose jolly little presence meant so much of the future to him, on whom he was building his own life-work as he had up till now conceived of it.  How if it were his Nicky who was destined never to learn, never to be pulled out of the slough of deadly content, never to know any of the things that make life rich and the horizon not only the material one proscribed by locality?  The countryside was full of little Nickies—­not so finely dowered by nature, doubtless thicker of skull and soul, but still little Nickies....  Better co-workers with Nicky these could be made.  For the first time he saw not only Cloom and his own tenants, but the whole countryside that he knew so well, growing finer, freer.

And it was all about a school board!  An ordinary enough thing now, when custom has staled it and the many faults in the system have become visible; but, printing once invented, school boards could no more be held back than the eventual express railway engine once Hero of Alexandria had made his little experiments with a steam kettle.  About the benefit of either there may be two opinions, but none about their inevitability.

At the time of the Forster Act the school board was a new and thrilling thing, one more sign of the approaching day when reform should have made a perfect world.  Very famous and great people did not scorn to sit upon it, and the whole movement was considered in the light of a benevolent revolution.  Ishmael, seeing with the eyes of his age and time, tingled to the thought.  It was the first occasion on which the cup of ambition had been held before him, and to him it was momentous.  He said little, but did not try and dissuade the Parson when he declared he would take the matter to the authorities, and he listened to Flynn for the rest of that evening with less the sensation of the outsider, the mere onlooker, than ever before.