as everyone's must be in greater or less
measure, was intermingled at many of its edges with those of the two
girls'. But always it was the Parson who held his heart as far as any
human entity could be said to do so. For it was still the world of
things and ideas which filled the round of his horizon most for Ishmael,
and in that world the thought of his great trust held ever-strengthening
place.

One great cause for relief he had, which came upon him soon after the
settlement of the scholastic arrangement at the Vicarage, and that was
the departure of Archelaus, who enlisted and went to the Crimea. Later
he was wounded and discharged, but even then he did not come home, but
went to the goldfields of New South Wales. The great fever of that rush
was on, and, any form of mining being in a Cornishman's blood, there
were many that went from West Penwith alone. The malignant presence of
Archelaus withdrawn, though he did not understand the malignancy,
Ishmael felt lighter, freer. Tom he hardly ever saw, and the girls were
under dire penalties from the Parson never to hint to Ishmael the true
reason of the domestic complications of Cloom. That Boase reserved for
himself, as a difficult telling, which Ishmael might take hardly, and
for which he was to be well fortified in the years of childhood.

Long after, on looking back, Ishmael saw better the whole atmosphere of
those years from eight to twelve than he did when in the midst of them.
Golden summers, when he spent whole days out on the cliff or moor with
the Parson, their specimen cases at their backs; ruddy autumns when the
peewits cried in the dappled sky and the blackberries were thick on the
marsh; grey winters when the rain and mist blotted the world out, and he
and the Parson sat by a glowing fire of wreckage, the Parson reading
aloud from Jorrocks or Pickwick, or the entrancing tales of Captain
Marryat, and later, for more solid matter, Grote's "History of Greece,"
its democratic inferences counterbalanced by "Sartor Resartus," whose
thunderous sentences enthralled Ishmael, if their purport was yet beyond
him; wonderful pale springs when the sunshine and the blood in his veins
were both like golden wine. So the time went, and it mostly belonged to
himself and his dreams, with even the Parson more unconsciously felt
than actively realised, and with the two girls still more upon the
fringe, though it was true there were splendid games, such as Cavaliers
and Roundhead