They were, he realised much later, the happiest years of his life.  Looking back on them, he grudged his unconsciousness of the fact at the time.  There is nothing in the world quite like the atmosphere of an old-fashioned English parsonage—­the quietness, the well-bred but simple air of it, with a tang of scholarly mustiness, the whole of a fragrance never entirely lost to those who have known it intimately.  Something of the spirit of George Herbert, that homely gentleman of unassuming saintliness, the epitome of everything that was best and most characteristic in the Anglican Church, has descended on country parsonages ever since and is only now beginning to wear thin.  And it was the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne—­how above all he would have loved the works of Traherne if they had then been discovered!—­that Boase represented.  A Church domestic, so to speak, with priestly powers, but wielded as the common laws of a household.  The widening ripples of the Oxford Movement had touched even the West with its spreading circle, but though it had his respect it left him curiously unstirred.  Its doctrines were his already, perhaps with a wider interpretation here and there; and for ritual, except in so far that he liked everything done decently, he had no feeling.  His sense of religion was profound but simple, as simple as daily bread.  He held that it should be allowed to become part of a child as unforcedly as air or food, and he had an especial horror of what are known as heart-to-heart talks.  Above all he abominated revivals, he knew too much of the greater apathy that welled in their hysterical wake.  Wesley, he held, had had a mission, which is a very different thing.

Therefore the Parson’s first care with Ishmael was to sweep him as bare of all thought as might be.  He even stopped him when the child, still conscience-ridden, would have poured out exaggerations of misdoings, though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance.  It was against Ishmael’s nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson again.  As it was, he began, in his secretive way, to copy Boase at all points that seemed good to him, doing things of his own initiative which he would have rebelled from being told.  When the Parson got him a pony at fair-time, Ishmael soon gathered that a gentleman rode without kicking his horse in the belly or jagging at its mouth, as was the custom in that part of the world.  He learnt, too, by the simple reappearance of a tin bath, flanked by an earthen pitcher of water, in his room morning after morning, that a gentleman washed all over every day.  At first this bored him considerably, but after one day when the Parson took him down to the cove to bathe, and he had occasion to be ashamed of his grubby little legs and feet beside the other’s shining whiteness, that too altered.  Yet the Parson had said nothing, hardly given more than a