He could say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, and part of the Creed, and from his seat in church he could make out most of the virtues credited to the last account of one Roger Beaufoy, who in this life had been entitled to write Esquire after his name.  The name kept the title after it—­Armiger—­though the man himself had long departed to a life with other distinctions.  If the tablet were to be believed, he had been a gentle squire too.  The schoolmaster was wont to murmur the list of his qualities over to himself:  fortis—­mitis
—­suavis—­largus—­urbanus:—­desideratissimus too, and no marvel!—­nobili genere natus—­and tam corpore quam vultus praeclarus!

     It was a goodly list that the schoolmaster muttered over, and when
     it was done he would add—­“His very portrait, every line, every
     word of it!” And then he would sigh.

Old as he was, the schoolmaster was not bearing testimony to the truth of the inscription as regarded the man he referred to; that Roger Beaufoy had gone back with all his virtues and his vices to the Maker of Souls long before the schoolmaster could read what had been written of him by the maker of epitaphs.  It was to the character of another Roger—­the great-grandson of this squire—­that the old man adapted the graceful flattery of the epitaph.  It fitted in every fold, and yet he sighed.  For in this Roger, as in that, the sterner virtues were lacking.  They had not even been supplied upon the marble, though that is a charity not uncommonly granted to the dead.  But when the genial virtues abound, the world misses the others so little!

[Here the sheet of paper is torn, but from the words on the part left it is evident that there was a description of the frontispiece in the schoolmaster’s book.  Apparently the subject of the picture was allegorical, and the figures of “monstrous beasts” were interspersed with “devices” and “scrolls with inscriptions,” together with figures]

     of kneeling saints, or pilgrims treading the Via Vitae with
     sandalled shoes and heavy staves; and between the lips of dolorous
     faces in penal fires issued the words O AEternitas!  AEternitas!

All these things the schoolmaster duly interpreted, but the rest of the story he made up out of his own head, a custom which had this among other advantages, that the stories were not always the same, which they must have been had the good man been a merely fluent translator.

At the schoolmaster’s elbow nestled his little granddaughter.  By herself she could not have secured so good a place, for she was fragile and very gentle, and most of the other children were rough and strong.  “First come first served” was the motto of their play.  First-come was served first because he helped himself, and the only exception to the rule was when Second-come happened to be stronger and