My Young Alcides

shocked at the contrast between our poor and the Australian settlers, where food and space were plenty and the wages high. I was somewhat hurt at his way of viewing what had always seemed to me perfection, at least all that could be reasonably expected for the poor--our pet school, our old women, our civil dependents in tidy cottages, our picturesque lodges; and I did not half like his trenchant questions, which seemed to imply censure on all that I had hitherto thought unquestionable, and perhaps I told him somewhat impatiently that, when he had been a little longer here, he would understand our ways and fall naturally into them.

'That's just what I don't want,' he said.

'Not want?' I exclaimed.

'Yes; I want to see clearly before I get used to things.'

And as, perhaps, I seemed to wonder at this way of beginning, he opened a little, and said, 'It is my father. He told me that if ever I came here I was to mind and do his work.'

'What kind of work?' I asked, anxiously.

'Doing what he meant to have done,' returned Harold, 'for the poor. He said I should find out about it.'

'You must have been too young to understand much of what he meant then,' I said. 'Did he not regret anything?'

'Yes, he said he had begun at the wrong end, when they were not ripe for it, and that the failure had ruined him for trying again.'

'Then he did see things differently at last?' I said, hoping to find that the sentiments I had always heard condemned had not been perpetuated.

'Oh yes!' cried Eustace. 'They were just brutes, you know, that nobody could do any good to, and were only bent on destroying, and had no gratitude nor sense; and that was the ruin of him and of my father too.'

'They were ignorant, and easily maddened,' said Harold, gravely. 'He did not know how little they could be controlled. I must find out the true state of things. Prometesky said I must read it up.'

'Prometesky!' I cried in despair. 'Oh, Harold, you have not been influenced by that old firebrand?'

'He taught me almost all I know,' was the answer, still much to my dismay; but I showed Harold to the library, and directed him to some old books of my father's, which I fancied might enlighten him on the subjects on which he needed information, though I feared they might be rather out of date; and whenever he was not out of doors, he was reading them, sometimes running his fingers through his yellow hair, or pulling his beard, and growling to himself when he was puzzled or met with what he did not like. Eustace's favourite study, meanwhile, was 'Burke's Peerage,' and his questions nearly drove me wild by their absurdity; and Dora rolled on the floor with my Spitz dog, for she loathed the doll I gave her, and made me more afraid of her than of either of the others.

Harold was all might and gentleness; Eustace viewed me as a glass of fashion and directory of English life and manners; but I saw they both looked to me not only to make their home, but to tame their little wild cat of a child; and that was enough to make her hate and distrust me. Moreover, she had a gleam of jealousy not far from fierce in her wild blue eyes if she saw Harold turn affectionately to me, and she always protested sullenly against the 'next week,' when I was to begin her education.

She could only read words of four letters, and could not, or would not, work a stitch. Harold had done all her mending. On the second day I passed by the open door of his room, and saw him at work on a great rectangular rent in her frock. I could not help stopping to suggest that Colman or I might save him that trouble, whereupon Dora slammed the door in my face.

Harold opened it again at once, saying, 'You ought to beg Aunt Lucy's pardon;' and when no apology could be extracted from her, and with thanks he handed over the little dress to me, she gave a shriek of anger (she hardly ever shed tears) and snatched it from me again.

'Well, well,' said Harold, patting her curly head; 'I'll finish this time, but not again, Dora. Next time, Aunt Lucy will be so good as to see to it. After old Betty's eyes grew bad we had to do our own needling.'

I confess it was a wonderful performance--quite as neat as Colman could have made it; and I suspect that Harold did not refrain from producing needle and thread from his fat miscellaneous pocket-book, and repairing her many disasters before they reached the domestic eye; for there was a chronic feud between Dora and Colman, and the attempts of the latter to make the child more like a young lady were passionately repelled, though she would better endure those of a rough little under-housemaid, whose civilisation was, I suppose, not quite so far removed from her own.

On Sunday, she and Harold disappeared as soon as breakfast was over, and only Eustace remained, spruce beyond all imagination, and giving himself childlike credit for not being with them; but when at church I can't say much for his behaviour. He stared unblushingly, whispered remarks and inquiries, could not find the places in his book, and appeared incapable of kneeling. Our little church at Arghouse was then a chapelry, with merely Sunday morning service by a curate from Mycening, and the congregation a village one, to the disgust of Eustace, who had expected to review his neighbours, and thought his get-up thrown away.

'No one at all to see,' he observed with discontent over our luncheon, Harold and Dora having returned from roaming over Kalydon Moor.

'I go to afternoon service at Mycening, Harold,' I said. 'Will not you come with me?'

'There will be somebody there?' asked Eustace; to which I replied in the affirmative, but with some protest against his view of the object, and inviting the others again, but Dora defiantly answered that Harold was going to swing her on the ash tree.

'You ought to appear at church, Harry,' said Eustace. 'It is expected of an English squire. You see everybody, and everybody sees you.'

'Well, then, go,' said Harold.

'And won't you?' I entreated.

'I've promised to swing Dora,' he answered, strolling out of the room, much to my concern; and though Eustace did accompany me, it was so evidently for the sake of staring that there was little comfort in that; and it was only by very severe looks that I could keep him from asking everyone's name. I hoped to make every one understand that he was not the squire, but no one came across us as we went out of church, and I had to reply to his torrent of inquiries all the way home.

It was a wet evening, and we all stayed in the house. Harold brought in one of his political economy studies from the library, and I tried to wile Dora to look at the pictures in a curious big old Dutch Scripture history, the Sunday delight of our youth.

Eustace came too, as if he wanted the amusement and yet was ashamed to take it, when he exclaimed, 'I say, Harry; isn't this the book father used to tell us about--that they used to look over?'

Harold came, and stood towering above us with his hands in his pockets; but when we came to the Temptation of Eve, Dora broke out into an exclamation that excited my curiosity too much not to be pursued, though it was hardly edifying.

'Was that such a snake as Harold killed?'

'I have killed a good many snakes,' he answered.

'Yes, but I meant the ones you killed when you were a little tiny boy.'

'I don't remember,' he said, as if to stop the subject, hating, as he always did, to talk about himself.

'No, I know you don't,' said Dora; 'but it is quite true, isn't it, Eustace?'

'Hardly true that Harold ever was a little tiny boy,' I could not help saying.

'No, he never was little,' said Eustace. 'But it is quite true about the snakes. I seem to remember it now, and I've often heard my mother and my Aunt Alice tell of it. It was at the first place where we were in New South Wales. I came running out screaming, I believe- -I was old enough to know the danger--and when they went in there was Harry sitting on the floor, holding a snake tight by the neck and enjoying its contortions like a new toy.'

'Of course,' said Harold, 'if it were poisonous, which I doubt, the danger would have been when I let go. My mother quietly bade me hold him tight, which I suppose I had just sense enough to do, and in another moment she had snatched up the bill-hook they had been cutting wood with, and had his head off. She had the pluck.'

I could but gasp with horror, and ask how old he was. About two! That was clear to their minds from the place where it happened which Harold could not recollect, though Eustace could.

'But, Harold, you surely are the eldest,' I said.

'Oh no; I am six months the eldest,' said Eustace, proud of his advantage.

We were to hear more of that by-and-by.