All this had happened in the holidays, but when they were over school opened as before, and with additional scholars; for sympathy was wide and warm with the school-mistress.  Strangely enough, both partners in the firm which had prosecuted Mr. Wood were dead.  Their successors offered him employment, but he could not face the old associations.  I believe he found it so hard to face any one, that this was the reason of his staying at home for a time and helping in the school.  I don’t think we boys made him uncomfortable as grown-up strangers seemed to do, and he was particularly fond of Cripple Charlie.

This brought me into contact with him, for Charlie and I were great friends.  He was as well pleased to be read to out of the Penny Numbers as the bee-master, and he was interested in things of which Isaac Irvine was completely ignorant.

Our school was a day-school, but Charlie had been received by Mrs. Wood as a boarder.  His poor back could not have borne to be jolted to and from the moors every day.  So he lived at Walnut-tree Farm, and now and then his father would come down in a light cart, lent by one of the parishioners, and take Charlie home from Saturday to Monday, and then bring him back again.

The sisters came to see him too, by turns, sometimes walking and sometimes riding a rough-coated pony, who was well content to be tied to a gate, and eat some of the grass that overgrew the lane.  And often Charlie came to us, especially in haytime, for haycocks seem very comfortable (for people whose backs hurt) to lean against; and we could cover his legs with hay too, as he liked them to be hidden.  There is no need to say how tender my mother was to him, and my father used to look at him half puzzledly and half pitifully, and always spoke to him in quite a different tone of voice to the one he used with other boys.

Jem gave Charlie the best puppy out of the curly brown spaniel lot; but he didn’t really like being with him, though he was sorry for him, and he could not bear seeing his poor legs.

“They make me feel horrid,” Jem said.  “And even when they’re covered up, I know they’re there.”

“You’re a chip of the old block, Jem,” said my father, “I’d give a guinea to a hospital any day sooner than see a patient.  I’m as sorry as can be for the poor lad, but he turns me queer, though I feel ashamed of it.  I like things sound.  Your mother’s different; she likes ’em better for being sick and sorry, and I suppose Jack takes after her.”

My father was wrong about me.  Pity for Charlie was not half of the tie between us.  When he was talking, or listening to the penny numbers, I never thought about his legs or his back, and I don’t now understand how anybody could.

He read and remembered far more than I did, and he was even wilder about strange countries.  He had as adventurous a spirit as any lad in the school, cramped up as it was in that misshapen body.  I knew he’d have liked to go round the world as well as I, and he often laughed and said—­“What’s more, Jack, if I’d the money I would.  People are very kind to poor wretches like me all over the world.  I should never want a helping hand, and the only difference between us would be, that I should be carried on board ship by some kind-hearted blue-jacket, and you’d have to scramble for yourself.”