en no tawse or ferule will avail."

And while the Paymaster and the Dominie were thus discussing Gilian, the
school would be in a tumult whereof he was sometimes the leader. To him
the restraints were galling shackles. When the classes would be humming
in the drowsy afternoon and the sharp high voice of old Brooks rose
above the murmur as he taught some little class in the upper corner, the
boy would be gazing with vacant eyes at the whitewashed wall in front of
him, or looking out at the beech branches that tapped in faint breezes
at the back windows, or listening with an ecstatic ear to the crisp
contact of stone and scythe as the mowers in the fields behind put a
new edge on their instruments. Oh! the outer world was ever the world
of charm for him, winter or summer, as he sat in that constrained and
humming school. That sound of scythes a-sharping was more pleasing to
his ear than the poetry Mr. Brooks imposed upon his scholars, showing,
himself, how to read it with a fierce high limping accent as if it were
a thing offensive. When hail or rain rattled on the branches, when snow
in great flakes settled down or droves of cattle for distant markets
went bellowing through the street, it was with difficulty the boy kept
himself to his seat and did not rise and run out where his fancy so
peremptorily called.

If he learned from books at all, it was from the wonderful, dusty,
mildewed volumes that Marget Maclean had on her shelves behind the
post-office. She was one of three sisters and they were all so much
alike that Gilian, with many other boys, never learned to know one from
the other, so it was ever Marget who was behind the counter, a thin old
lady of carefully nurtured gentility, with cheeks like a winter apple
for hue, with eyebrows arching high in a perpetual surprise at so
hurried and ridiculous a world, and a curled brown wig that was
suspected of doing duty for the three sisters who were never seen but
one at a time. Marget Maclean's little shop was the dullest in the
street, but it was the anteroom of fairydom for Gilian who borrowed
books there with the pence cozened from Miss Mary. In the choosing of
them he had no voice. He had but to pay his penny and Marget would peer
through her glasses at the short rows of volumes until she came upon the
book she thought most suited for her customer.

"You will find that a good one," she would say. "The one you mention
is not at all good; it was very fashionable last