“I do not feel quite sure about So-so.  Wild dogs often amend their ways far on this side of the gallows, and the Faithful sometimes fall, but when any one begins by being only so-so, he is very apt to be so-so to the end.  So-so’s so seldom change.”

Before turning from the record of my sister’s life at Manchester, I must mention a circumstance which gave her very great pleasure there.  In the summer of 1875 she and I went up from Aldershot to see the Exhibition of Water-Colours by the Royal Society of Painters, and she was completely fascinated by a picture of Mr. J.D.  Watson’s, called “A Gentleman of the Road.”  It represented a horseman at daybreak, allowing his horse to drink from a stream, whilst he sat half-turned in the saddle to look back at a gallows which was visible on the horizon against the beams of rising light.  The subject may sound very sensational, but it was not that aspect of it which charmed my sister; she found beauty as well as romance in it, and after we returned to camp in the evening she became so restless and engrossed by what she had seen, that she got up during the night, and planned out the headings of a story on the picture, adding—­characteristically—­a moral or “soul” to the subject by a quotation[31] from Thomas a Kempis—­Respice finem.  “In all things remember the end.”

[Footnote 31:  Letter, March 22, 1880.]

This “mapped-out” story, I am sorry to say, remains unfinished.  The manuscript went through many vicissitudes, was inadvertently torn up and thrown into the waste-paper basket, whence it was rescued and the pieces carefully enclosed in an envelope ready for mending.  It was afterwards lost again for many months in a box that was sent abroad, but the fragments have been put together and copied, as they are interesting from the promise that lies in the few words that remain.

     A GENTLEMAN OF THE ROAD.

The old schoolmaster sat on a tombstone, an ancient altar-shaped tomb which may have been reared when the yew tree above it was planted.  Children clustered round him like bees upon a branch, and he held the book wide open so that, if possible, all might see into it at once.  It was not a school-book, it was a picture book, the one out of which he told tales to the children on half-holidays.  The volume was old and the text was in Latin, a language of which the schoolmaster had some little knowledge.

     He could read the dial motto pat,—­Via crucis via lucis.  The Way
     of the Cross is the Way of Light.

He understood the Latin headings to the Psalms and Canticles better than the clerk, for he could adjust the words to their English equivalents.  The clerk took them as they stood, Nunc dimittis, or the Song of Simeon.  It was put down so in the rubric, he said, as plain as “Here endeth the first lesson.”

The schoolmaster made no such blunders.