Meanwhile, the Parson told Ishmael, in language that made everything seem clean and wonderful, as much as he thought wise of the mysteries which had perplexed him and Jacka’s John-Willy over the snail.  The ideals Ishmael gradually absorbed during these years made the thought of the furtive conversations with John-Willy seem hateful, and with their swift acquisitiveness of values both little girls appreciated that he would be superior to them if they indulged in any of the vulgarities most children are apt to fall into at one period, harmless enough in fact, but not cleansing to the mind.  Therefore each of the three affected the other two in some way, and the pattern of Ishmael’s life, though so essentially isolated as everyone’s must be in greater or less measure, was intermingled at many of its edges with those of the two girls’.  But always it was the Parson who held his heart as far as any human entity could be said to do so.  For it was still the world of things and ideas which filled the round of his horizon most for Ishmael, and in that world the thought of his great trust held ever-strengthening place.

One great cause for relief he had, which came upon him soon after the settlement of the scholastic arrangement at the Vicarage, and that was the departure of Archelaus, who enlisted and went to the Crimea.  Later he was wounded and discharged, but even then he did not come home, but went to the goldfields of New South Wales.  The great fever of that rush was on, and, any form of mining being in a Cornishman’s blood, there were many that went from West Penwith alone.  The malignant presence of Archelaus withdrawn, though he did not understand the malignancy, Ishmael felt lighter, freer.  Tom he hardly ever saw, and the girls were under dire penalties from the Parson never to hint to Ishmael the true reason of the domestic complications of Cloom.  That Boase reserved for himself, as a difficult telling, which Ishmael might take hardly, and for which he was to be well fortified in the years of childhood.

Long after, on looking back, Ishmael saw better the whole atmosphere of those years from eight to twelve than he did when in the midst of them.  Golden summers, when he spent whole days out on the cliff or moor with the Parson, their specimen cases at their backs; ruddy autumns when the peewits cried in the dappled sky and the blackberries were thick on the marsh; grey winters when the rain and mist blotted the world out, and he and the Parson sat by a glowing fire of wreckage, the Parson reading aloud from Jorrocks or Pickwick, or the entrancing tales of Captain Marryat, and later, for more solid matter, Grote’s “History of Greece,” its democratic inferences counterbalanced by “Sartor Resartus,” whose thunderous sentences enthralled Ishmael, if their purport was yet beyond him; wonderful pale springs when the sunshine and the blood in his veins were both like golden wine.  So the time went, and it mostly belonged to himself