child of four, a cripple, whom he had lamed in her infancy, by letting
her fall as he tossed her in his arms while in drink. The constant
terror of his mind was lest some further accident should befall her.
Between class and class he would go to a window, from which, when he had
thrown up its lower sash, dim with the scratches of names, he could see
one end of his own white cottage, and the little pathway, between lines
of gilvers, coming down from the porch.

Pete had seen the little one hobbling along this path on her lame leg,
and giggling with a heart of glee when she had eluded the eyes of her
mother and escaped into the road. One day it chanced, after the heavy
spring rains had swollen every watercourse, that he came upon the little
curly poll, tumbling and tossing like a bell-buoy in a gale, down the
flood of the river that runs to the sea at Port Mooar. Pete rescued the
child and took her home, and then, as if he had done nothing unusual, he
went on to school, dripping water from his legs at every step.

When John Thomas saw him coming, in bare feet, triddle-traddle,
triddle-traddle, up the school-house floor, his indignation at the boy
for being later than usual rose to fiery wrath for being drenched as
well. Waiting for no explanation, concluding that Pete had been fishing
for crabs among the stones of Port Lewaigue, he burst into a loud volley
of his accustomed expletives, and timed and punctuated them by a thwack
of the cane between every word.

"The waistrel! (thwack). The dirt! (thwack). I'm taiching him (thwack),
and taiching him (thwack), and he won't be taicht!" (Thwack, thwack,
thwack.)

Pete said never a word. Boiling his stinging shoulders under his jacket,
and ramming his smarting hands, like wet eels, into his breeches'
pockets, he took his place in silence at the bottom of the class.

But a girl, a little dark thing in a red frock, stepped out from her
place beside the boy, shot up like a gleam to the schoolmaster as he
returned to his seat among the cloth and needles, dealt him a smart slap
across the face, and then burst into a lit of hysterical crying. Her
name was Katherine Cregeen. She was the daughter of Caesar the Cornaa
miller, the founder of Ballajora Chapel, and a mighty man among the
Methodists.

Katherine went unpunished, but that was the end of Pete's schooling.
His learning was not too heavy for a big lad's head to carry--a bit
of reading if it was all in print, and no writin