, quaking and whimpering, stepped out to
the mouth of the cave. At the next moment Philip found himself snatched
up into the arms of Aunty Nan, who kissed him and cried over him, and
rammed a great chunk of sweet cake into his cheek. Pete was faring
differently. Under the leathern belt of Black Tom, who was thrashing him
for both of them, he was howling like the sea in a storm.

Thus the Carrasdhoo men came home by the light of early morning--Pete
skipping before the belt and bellowing; and Philip holding a piece of
the cake at his teeth to comfort him.

IV.

Philip left home for school at King William's by Castletown, and then
Pete had a hard upbringing. His mother was tender enough, and there were
good souls like Aunty Nan to show pity to both of them. But life went
like a springless bogey, nevertheless. Sin itself is often easier than
simpleness to pardon and condone. It takes a soft heart to feel tenderly
towards a soft head.

Poor Pete's head seemed soft enough and to spare. No power and no
persuasion could teach him to read and write. He went to school at the
old schoolhouse by the church in Maughold village. The schoolmaster was
a little man called John Thomas Corlett, pert and proud, with the sharp
nose of a pike and the gait of a bantam. John Thomas was also a tailor.
On a cowhouse door laid across two school forms he sat cross-legged
among his cloth, his "maidens," and his smoothing irons, with his boys
and girls, class by class, in a big half circle round about him.

The great little man had one standing ground of daily assault on the
dusty jacket of poor Pete, and that was that the lad came late to
school. Every morning Pete's welcome from the tailor-schoolmaster was a
volley of expletives, and a swipe of the cane across his shoulders. "The
craythur! The dunce! The durt! I'm taiching him, and taiching him, and
he won't be taicht."

The soul of the schoolmaster had just two human weaknesses. One of these
was a weakness for drink, and as a little vessel he could not take much
without being full. Then he always taught the Church catechism and swore
at his boys in Manx.

"Peter Quilliam," he cried one day, "who brought you out of the land of
Egypt and the house of bondage?"

"'Deed, master," said Pete, "I never was in no such places, for I never
had the money nor the clothes for it, and that's how stories are getting
about."

The second of the schoolmaster's frailties was love of his daughter, a