There were no curtains to the broad, mullioned window, which was kept wide open at every lattice; and one long shoot of ivy that had pushed in farther than the rest had been seized, and pinned to the wall inside, where its growth was a subject of study and calculation, during the many moments when we were “trying to see” how little we could learn of our lessons.  The black-board stood on a polished easel; but the low seats and desks were of plain pine like the floor, and they were scrupulously scrubbed.  The cool tint of the walls was somewhat cheered by coloured maps and prints, and the school-mistress’s chair (an old carved oak one that had been much revived by bees-wax and turpentine since the miser’s days) stood on the left-hand side of the window—­under “Keep Innocency,” and looking towards “Peace at the last.”  I know, for when we were all writing or something of that sort, so that she could sit still, she used to sit with her hands folded and look up at it, which was what made Jem and me think of the old white hen that turned up its eyes; and made Horace Simpson say that he believed she had done one of the letters wrong, and could not help looking at it to see if it showed.  And by the school-mistress’s chair was the lame boy’s sofa.  It was the very old sofa covered with newspapers on which I had read about the murder, when the lawyer was reading the will.  But she had taken off the paper, and covered it with turkey red, and red cushions, and a quilt of brown holland and red bordering, to hide his crumpled legs, so that he looked quite comfortable.

I remember so well the first day that he came.  His father was a parson on the moors, and this boy had always wanted to go to school in spite of his infirmity, and at last his father brought him in a light cart down from the moors, to look at it; and when he got him out of the cart, he carried him in.  He was a big man, I remember, with grey hair and bent shoulders, and a very old coat, for it split a little at one of the seams as he was carrying him in, and we laughed.

When they got into the room, he put the boy down, keeping his arm round him, and wiped his face and said—­“How deliciously cool!”—­and the boy stared all round with his great eyes, and then he lifted them to his father’s face and said—­“I’ll come here.  I do like it.  But not to-day, my back is so bad.”

And what makes me know that Horace was wrong, and that Mrs. Wood had made no mistake about the letters of the text, is that “Cripple Charlie”—­as we called him—­could see it so well with lying down.  And he told me one day that when his back was very bad, and he got the fidgets and could not keep still, he used to fix his eyes on “Peace,” which had gold round the letters, and shone, and that if he could keep steadily to it, for a good bit, he always fell asleep at the last.  But he was very fanciful, poor chap!

I do not think it was because Jem and I had any real wish to become burglars that we made a raid on the walnuts that autumn.  I do not even think that we cared very much about the walnuts themselves.