her coffee), I heard her mutter—­“Soldiers is very upsetting.”  Certainly, considering what she did in the way of scolding, scouring, blackleading, polishing and sand-papering that week, it was not Martha’s fault if we did not “get straight again,” furniture and feelings.  I’ve heard her say that Calais sand would “fetch anything off,” and I think it had fetched the Colonel off her heart by the time that the cleaning was done.

It had no such effect on mine.  Lewis Lorraine himself did not worship his uncle more devoutly than I. Colonel Jervois had given me a new ideal.  It was possible, then, to be enthusiastic without being unmanly; to live years out of England, and come back more patriotic than many people who stayed comfortably at home; to go forth into the world and be the simpler as well as the wiser, the softer as well as the stronger for the experience?  So it seemed.  And yet Lewis had told me, with such tears as Snuffy never made him shed, how tender his uncle was to his unworthiness, what allowances he made for the worst that Lewis could say of himself, and what hope he gave him of a good and happy future.

“He cried as bad as I did,” Lewis said, “and begged me to forgive him for having trusted so much to my other guardian.  Do you know, Jack, Snuffy regularly forged a letter like my handwriting, to answer that one Uncle Eustace wrote, which he kept back?  He might well do such good copies, and write the year of Our Lord with a swan at the end of the last flourish!  And you remember what we heard about his having been in prison—­but, oh, dear!  I don’t want to remember.  He says I am to forget, and he forbade me to talk about Crayshaw’s, and said I was not to trouble my head about anything that had happened there.  He kept saying, ’Forget, my boy, forget!  Say GOD help me, and look forward.  While there’s life there’s always the chance of a better life for every one.  Forget! forget!’”

Lewis departed with his uncle.  Charlie went for two nights to the moors.  Jem’s holidays had not begun, and in our house we were “cleaning down” after the Colonel as if he had been the sweeps.

I went to old Isaac for sympathy.  He had become very rheumatic the last two years, but he was as intelligent as ever, and into his willing ear I poured all that I could tell of my hero, and much that I only imagined.

His sympathy met me more than half-way.  The villagers as a body were unbounded in their approval of the Colonel, and Mrs. Irvine was even greedier than old Isaac for every particular I could impart respecting him.

“He’s a handsome gentleman,” said the bee-master’s wife, “and he passed us (my neighbour, Mrs. Mettam, and me) as near, sir, as I am to you, with a gold-headed stick in his hand, and them lads following after him, for all the world like the Good Shepherd and his flock.”