ay from him.

Of course I did not care a button for Mr. Mustard. But he had always
been the Enemy of Youth so far as we were concerned. And it gave me a
queer feeling, I can tell you, to think of Elsie--my Elsie--teaching
alongside that snuffy old badger. He was neither snuffy nor yet very
old, but that is the way I felt toward him. Elsie, too--at least she
used to. But I could bet it was all the doing of that hook-nosed
sister of his--Betty Martin Mustard, we called her, though her name was
only Elizabeth, and not Martin at all.

Little Kit Seymour kept on lingering. She was smiling mischievously,
too, which she had no business to do. And she wouldn't have done it
long if she had been a boy. It got sort of irritating after a while,
though I wasn't donkey enough to let her see it. I knew better.

I just said that I hoped she, Elsie, would like school-teaching, and
that my father had always said that was what she should go in for. But
Kit went on swinging her green baize bag, like I've seen them do the
incense pot in Mr. Ablethorpe's church up at Breckonton. Father would
have skinned me alive if he knew I had gone there. He was a Churchman,
was father, but death on incense pots, confessions, and all apostolic
thingummies, such as Mr. Ablethorpe was just nuts on. He had even
stopped going to church at home because our old vicar had said that the
Anglican Church was a church catholic. I bet he didn't mean any harm.
He was a first-rate old fellow. But my father waited behind and told
him out loud that the Church of England is a Protestant church, and
"whoever says it isn't is a liar!"

That caused a coolness, of course. Yet I believe they both meant the
same thing. For our vicar wasn't one of Mr. Ablethorpe's sort, but
just wanted to let people alone, and was content if people left him
alone. But all things about churches made our Breckonside folk easily
mad--being, as I said before, actually on the border-line, or at least
very near to it.

Little Kit Seymour, with her lisp and soft south country English, was a
smart girl. I knew very well she was seeing how I would take the news
about Elsie. However, she did not get much change out of me.

"You aren't coming back to school again?" she said next, looking at the
toe of her boot.

"Oh, I don't know that," I told her; "old Mustard is well up in
mathematics and mensuration----"

"What's mensuration?" She said "men_th_uration," and curiously enough