`It's the best chance of making men of yourselves you ever had,
if you only knew it. You'll be rich farmers or settlers,
perhaps magistrates, one of these days -- that is, if you're not hanged.
It's you, I mean,' he'd say, pointing to me and Jim and the Dalys;
`I believe some of you WILL be hanged unless you change a good deal.
It's cold blood and bad blood that runs in your veins,
and you'll come to earn the wages of sin some day. It's a strange thing,'
he used to say, as if he was talking to himself, `that the girls are so good,
while the boys are delivered over to the Evil One, except a case
here and there. Look at Mary Darcy and Jane Lammerby,
and my little pet Aileen here. I defy any village in Britain
to turn out such girls -- plenty of rosy-cheeked gigglers --
but the natural refinement and intelligence of these little damsels
astonishes me.'

Well, the old man died suddenly, as I said, and we were all very sorry,
and the school was broken up. But he had taught us all
to write fairly and to keep accounts, to read and spell decently,
and to know a little geography. It wasn't a great deal,
but what we knew we knew well, and I often think of what he said,
now it's too late, we ought to have made better use of it.
After school broke up father said Jim and I knew quite as much
as was likely to be any good to us, and we must work for our living
like other people. We'd always done a pretty fair share of that,
and our hands were hard with using the axe and the spade,
let alone holding the plough at odd times and harrowing, helping father
to kill and brand, and a lot of other things, besides getting up
while the stars were in the sky so as to get the cows milked early,
before it was time to go to school.