“Oh, I wish you’d take me the next time!” said I.

“To be sure I will, and too glad sir, if you’re allowed to go.”

That was the difficulty, and I knew it.  No one who has not lived in a household of old-fashioned middle-class country folk of our type has any notion how difficult it is for anybody to do anything unusual therein.  In such a well-fitted but unelastic establishment the dinner-hour, the carriage horses, hot water, bedtime, candles, the post, the wash-day, and an extra blanket, from being the ministers of one’s comfort, become the stern arbiters of one’s fate.  Spring cleaning—­which is something like what it would be to build, paint, and furnish a house, and to “do it at home”—­takes place as naturally as the season it celebrates; but if you want the front door kept open after the usual hour for drawing the bolts and hanging the robbers’ bell, it’s odds if the master of the house has not an apoplectic fit, and if servants of twelve and fourteen years’ standing do not give warning.

And what is difficult on week-days is on Sundays next door to impossible, for obvious reasons.

But one’s parents, though they have their little ways like other people, are, as a rule—­oh, my heart! made sadder and wiser by the world’s rough experiences, bear witness!—­very indulgent; and after a good many ups and downs, and some compromising and coaxing, I got my way.

On one point my mother was firm, and I feared this would be an insuperable difficulty.  I must go twice to church, as our Sunday custom was—­a custom which she saw no good reason for me to break.  It is easy to smile at her punctiliousness on this score; but after all these years, and on the whole, I think she was right.  An unexpected compromise came to my rescue, however:  Isaac Irvine’s bees were in the parish of Cripple Charlie’s father, within a stone’s throw (by the bee-master’s strong arm) of the church itself, which was a small minster among the moors.  Here I promised faithfully to attend Evening Prayer, for which we should be in time; and I started, by Isaac Irvine’s side, on my first real “expedition” on the first Sunday in August, with my mother’s blessing and a threepenny-bit with a hole in it, “in case of a collection.”

We dined before we started, I with the rest, and Isaac in our kitchen; but I had no great appetite—­I was too much excited—­and I willingly accepted some large sandwiches made with thick slices of home-made bread and liberal layers of home-made potted meat, “in case I should feel hungry” before I got there.

It pains me to think how distressed my mother was because I insisted on carrying the sandwiches in a red and orange spotted handkerchief, which I had purchased with my own pocket-money, and to which I was deeply attached, partly from the bombastic nature of the pattern, and partly because it was big enough for any grown-up man.  “It made me look like a tramping sailor,” she said.  I did not tell her that this was precisely the effect at which I aimed, though it was the case; but I coaxed her into permitting it, and I abstained from passing a certain knowing little ash stick through the knot, and hoisting the bundle over my left shoulder, till I was well out of the grounds.