 place where he pleased. He had not come
for the sake of a lesson to-night, and his mind was too full of personal
matters, too full of the last two hours he had passed in Hetty's presence, for
him to amuse himself with a book till school was over; so he sat down in a
corner, and looked on with an absent mind. It was a sort of scene which Adam had
beheld almost weekly for years; he knew by heart every arabesque flourish in the
framed specimen of Bartle Massey's handwriting which hung over the
schoolmaster's head, by way of keeping a lofty ideal before the minds of his
pupils; he knew the backs of all the books on the shelf running along the
whitewashed wall above the pegs for the slates; he knew exactly how many grains
were gone out of the ear of Indian-corn that hung from one of the rafters; he
had long ago exhausted the resources of his imagination in trying to think how
the bunch of leathery sea-weed had looked and grown in its native element; and
from the place where he sat, he could make nothing of the old map of England
that hung against the opposite wall, for age had turned it of a fine yellow
brown, something like that of a well-seasoned meerschaum. The drama that was
going on was almost as familiar as the scene, nevertheless habit had not made
him indifferent to it, and even in his present self-absorbed mood, Adam felt a
momentary stirring of the old fellow-feeling, as he looked at the rough men
painfully holding pen or pencil with their cramped hands, or humbly labouring
through their reading lesson.
    The reading class now seated on the form in front of the schoolmaster's
desk, consisted of the three most backward pupils. Adam would have known it,
only by seeing Bartle Massey's face as he looked over his spectacles, which he
had shifted to the ridge of his nose, not requiring them for present purposes.
The face wore its mildest expression: the grizzled bushy eyebrows had taken
their more acute angle of compassionate kindness, and the mouth, habitually
compressed with a pout of the lower lip, was relaxed so as to be ready to speak
a helpful word or syllable in a moment. This gentle expression was the more
interesting because the schoolmaster's nose, an irregular aquiline twisted a
little on one side, had rather a formidable character; and his brow, moreover,
had that peculiar tension which always impresses one as a sign of a keen
impatient temperament: the blue veins stood out like
