and his dreams, with even the Parson more unconsciously felt than actively realised, and with the two girls still more upon the fringe, though it was true there were splendid games, such as Cavaliers and Roundheads, which could not be played by himself.  For this and kindred affairs Vassie and Phoebe were of great use, though Phoebe cried if she had to be a Roundhead too often out of her turn.  Still, she was a good little thing, but when the fateful date arrived which was to see the journey to St. Renny, Ishmael had no pang at leaving her or anyone else.  He was not a shy boy, and felt only intense interest at the thought of what lay before him.  For the journey in a railway train was alone enough to set the blood thrilling—­it was a thing that no one whom Ishmael knew, excepting Parson Boase, had ever undertaken.  It was only a matter of five years since the West Cornwall Railway from Truro Road to Penzance had been opened.  The same year the great Duke had died, but the opening of the railway, with the mayor and all the magistrates and the volunteer band in attendance, had made far the greater stir in West Penwith.  Iron Dukes were intangible creatures compared with iron engines, although the Parson had preached about the former and seemed to think, as some parishioners said, that it might have been the Almighty Himself who had passed away.  Wellington had gone, but the railway had come—­therein lay the difference; and Ishmael swelled with pride as he talked casually to Phoebe of the experience before him.

The miller lent his trap for the drive into Penzance, for, incredible as it may seem, there was still hardly a cart in the countryside, all the carrying of turf, furze, and produce being done on donkeys’ back, and thus it came about that Phoebe came too to see him off.  She held her round softly-tinted face, with the mouse-coloured ringlets falling away from it, up to his in the railway station as he prepared to climb to his place in the pumpkin-shaped compartment.  He ensured a tear-wet pillow for her that night by merely shaking her hand at the full length of a rigid arm.

CHAPTER IX

FRESH PASTURE

For most children the first day at school is a memorable landmark; for Ishmael it was the more so because all his life hitherto he had lived in one atmosphere, without the little voyagings and visitings in which more happily-placed children are able to indulge.  The change to St. Renny, although in the same county, was a great one, for whereas Cloom lay on the wind-swept promontory where only occasional folds in the land could give some hint of what gentler-nurtured pastures might be like, the whole little grey town of St. Renny seemed embowered in foliage that did not indeed encroach upon its actual ways, but that gave the rolling slopes of its guarding hills a richness of dark green that Ishmael had never imagined trees could hold.  The life itself bore a very similar analogy to that