years she had nourished a secret antagonism to her husband’s spirit of political, social, and religious rebellion, and in her widowhood she speedily became a pattern of the conservative female.  It would have gratified her to discern any possibility of Godwin’s assuming the priestly garb.  And not alone on the ground of conscience.  Long ago she had repented the marriage which connected her with such a family as that of the Peaks, and she ardently desired that the children, now exclusively her own, might enter life on a plane superior to their father’s.

‘Godwin, how would you like to go to College and be a clergyman?’ she asked one Sunday afternoon, when an hour or two of congenial reading seemed to have put the boy into a gentle humour.

‘To go to College’ was all very well (diplomacy had prompted this preface), but the words that followed fell so alarmingly on Godwin’s ear that he looked up with a resentful expression, unable to reply otherwise.

‘You never thought of it, I suppose?’ his mother faltered; for she often stood in awe of her son, who, though yet but fourteen, had much of his father’s commanding severity.

‘I don’t want to be a parson,’ came at length, bluntly.

‘Don’t use that word, Godwin.’

’Why not?  It’s quite a proper word.  It comes from the Latin persona.’

The mother had enough discretion to keep silence, and Godwin, after in vain trying to settle to his book again, left the room with disturbed countenance.

He had now been attending the day-school for about a year, and was distinctly ahead of his coevals.  A Christmas examination was on the point of being held, and it happened that a singular test of the lad’s moral character coincided with the proof of his intellectual progress.  In a neighbouring house lived an old man named Rawmarsh, kindly but rather eccentric; he had once done a good business as a printer, and now supported himself by such chance typographic work of a small kind as friends might put in his way.  He conceived an affection for Godwin; often had the boy to talk with him of an evening.  On one such occasion, Mr. Rawmarsh opened a desk, took forth a packet of newly printed leaves, and with a mysterious air silently spread them before the boy’s eyes.  In an instant Godwin became aware that he was looking at the examination papers which a day or two hence would be set before him at school; he saw and recognised a passage from the book of Virgil which his class had been reading.

‘That is sub rosa, you know,’ whispered the old printer, with half averted face.