The last day of every month would I fetch that scrolled note to Mr. Carvel, and he laid it beside his plate until dinner was over.  And then, as sure as the sun rose that morning, my flogging would come before it set.  This done with, and another promised next month provided Mr. Daaken wrote no better of me, my grandfather and I renewed our customary footing of love and companionship.

But Mr. Daaken, unwittingly or designedly, taught other things than those I have mentioned above.  And though I never once heard a word of politics fall from his lips, his school shortly became known to all good Tories as a nursery of conspiracy and sedition.  There are other ways of teaching besides preaching, and of that which the dominie taught best he spoke not a word.  He was credited, you may well believe, with calumnies against King George, and once my Uncle Grafton and Mr. Dulany were for clapping him in jail, avowing that he taught treason to the young.  I can account for the tone of King William’s School in no other way than to say that patriotism was in the very atmosphere, and seemed to exude in some mysterious way from Mr. Daaken’s person.  And most of us became infected with it.

The dominie lived outside the town, in a lonely little hamlet on the borders of the Spa.  At two of the clock every afternoon he would dive through School Street to the Coffee House, where the hostler would have his bony mare saddled and waiting.  Mr. Daaken by no chance ever entered the tavern.  I recall one bright day in April when I played truant and had the temerity to go afishing on Spa Creek with Will Fotheringay, the bass being plentiful there.  We had royal sport of it that morning, and two o’clock came and went with never a thought, you may be sure.  And presently I get a pull which bends my English rod near to double, and in my excitement plunge waist deep into the water, Will crying out directions from the shore, when suddenly the head of Mr. Daaken’s mare is thrust through the bushes, followed by Mr. Daaken himself.  Will stood stock still from fright, and I was for dropping my rod and cutting, when I was arrested by the dominie calling out: 

“Have a care, Master Carvel; have a care, sir.  You will lose him.  Play him, sir; let him run a bit.”

And down he leaps from his horse and into the water after me, and together we landed a three-pound bass, thereby drenching his snuff-coloured suit.  When the big fish lay shining in the basket, the dominie smiled grimly at William and me as we stood sheepishly by, and without a word he drew his clasp knife and cut a stout switch from the willow near, and then and there he gave us such a thrashing as we remembered for many a day after.  And we both had another when we reached home.

“Mr. Carvel,” said Mr. Dulany to my grandfather, “I would strongly counsel you to take Richard from that school.  Pernicious doctrines, sir, are in the air, and like diseases are early caught by the young.  ’Twas but yesterday I saw Richard at the head of a rabble of the sons of riff-raff, in Green Street, and their treatment of Mr. Fairbrother hath set the whole town by the ears.”