ut his guardian
(for the boy's father was dead), seeing that he was being spoilt at
home, and that he was naturally a shrinking and timid lad, had urged
that he should be sent to Saint Winifred's, with some vague notion of
making a man of him. He might as well have thrown a piece of Brussels
lace into the fire with the intention of changing it into open
iron-work. The proper place for little Eden would have been some
country parsonage, where care and kindliness might have gradually helped
him, as he grew older, to acquire the faculties which he had not;
whereas, in this case, a public school only impaired for a time in that
tender frame the bright yet delicate qualities which he had.

The big, clumsy ne'er-do-well of a boy, Cradock by name, who was choking
with secret laughter as he tilted little Eden's bed--leaving a pause of
frightful suspense now and then to let him recover breath and realise
his situation--was as raw and ill-trained a fellow as you like, but he
had nothing in him wilfully or diabolically wicked. If he had been
similarly treated he would have broken into a great guffaw, and emptied
his water-jug over the intruder; and yet if he could have seen the new
boy at that moment, he would have seen that pretty little face--only
meant as yet for the smiles of childhood--white with an almost idiotic
terror, and he would have caught a staring and meaningless look in the
glassy eyes which were naturally so bright and blue. But he really did
not know--being merely an overgrown stupid fellow--the mischief he was
doing, and the absolute horrible torment that his jest (?) was
inflicting.

Finding that his joltings produced no apparent effect, and thinking that
Eden might, by some strange somnolence peculiar to new boys, sleep
through it all, he tilted the bed a little too high, and then indeed a
wild shriek rang through the room as the mattress and clothes tumbled
right over at the foot of the bed, and flung the child violently on the
floor. Fortunately the heap of bed-clothes prevented him from being
much hurt, and Cradock had just time to pick him up and huddle him into
bed again, and jump back into his own bed, when the lamp of one of the
masters, who had been attracted by Eden's cry, appeared through the
door. The master, finding all quiet, and having come from a distant
room, supposed that his ears had deceived him, or that the cry was some
accidental noise outside the building. He merely walked round th