“Be eddicated!” he said, articulating his words with difficulty,—­ “That’s what I says, boys!  Be eddicated!  Then everything’s right for us!  We can kick all the rich out into the mud and take their goods and enjoy ’em for ourselves.  Eddication does it!  Makes us all we wants to be,—­members o’ Parli’ment and what not!  I’ve only one boy,—­but he’ll be eddicated as his father never was—­”

“And learn to despise his father!” said Robin, suddenly, his clear voice ringing out above the other’s husky loquacity.  “You’re right!  That’s the best way to train a boy in the way he should go!”

There was a brief silence.  Then came a fresh murmur of voices and Ned Landon’s voice rose above them.

“I don’t agree with you, Mr. Clifford,” he said—­“There’s no reason why a well-educated lad should despise his father.”

“But he often does,” said Robin—­“reason or no reason.”

“Well, you’re educated yourself,” retorted Landon, with a touch of envy,—­“You won a scholarship at your grammar school, and you’ve been to a University.”

“What’s that done for me?” demanded Robin, carelessly,—­“Where has it put me?  Just nowhere, but exactly where I might have stood all the time.  I didn’t learn farming at Oxford!”

“But you didn’t learn to despise your father either, did you, sir?” queried one of the farm hands, respectfully.

“My father’s dead,” answered Robin, curtly,—­“and I honour his memory.”

“So your own argument goes to the wall!” said Landon.  “Education has not made you think less of him.”

“In my case, no,” said Robin,—­“but in dozens of other cases it works out differently.  Besides, you’ve got to decide what education is.  The man who knows how to plough a field rightly is as usefully educated as the man who knows how to read a book, in my opinion.”

“Education,” interposed a strong voice, “is first to learn one’s place in the world and then know how to keep it!”

All eyes turned towards the head of the table.  It was Farmer Jocelyn who spoke, and he went on speaking: 

“What’s called education nowadays,” he said, “is a mere smattering and does no good.  The children are taught, especially in small villages like ours, by men and women who often know less than the children themselves.  What do you make of Danvers, for example, boys?”

A roar of laughter went round the table.

“Danvers!” exclaimed a huge red-faced fellow at the other end of the board,—­“Why he talks yer ’ead off about what he’s picked up here and there like, and when I asked him to tell me where my son is as went to Mexico, blowed if he didn’t say it was a town somewheres near New York!”

Another roar went round the table.  Farmer Jocelyn smiled and held up his hand to enjoin silence.

“Mr. Danvers is a teacher selected by the Government,” he then observed, with mock gravity.  “And if he teaches us that Mexico is a town near New York, we poor ignorant farm-folk are bound to believe him!”