its spreading circle, but though it had his respect it left him
curiously unstirred. Its doctrines were his already, perhaps with a
wider interpretation here and there; and for ritual, except in so far
that he liked everything done decently, he had no feeling. His sense of
religion was profound but simple, as simple as daily bread. He held that
it should be allowed to become part of a child as unforcedly as air or
food, and he had an especial horror of what are known as heart-to-heart
talks. Above all he abominated revivals, he knew too much of the greater
apathy that welled in their hysterical wake. Wesley, he held, had had a
mission, which is a very different thing.

Therefore the Parson's first care with Ishmael was to sweep him as bare
of all thought as might be. He even stopped him when the child, still
conscience-ridden, would have poured out exaggerations of misdoings,
though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance. It
was against Ishmael's nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on
that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson
again. As it was, he began, in his secretive way, to copy Boase at all
points that seemed good to him, doing things of his own initiative which
he would have rebelled from being told. When the Parson got him a pony
at fair-time, Ishmael soon gathered that a gentleman rode without
kicking his horse in the belly or jagging at its mouth, as was the
custom in that part of the world. He learnt, too, by the simple
reappearance of a tin bath, flanked by an earthen pitcher of water, in
his room morning after morning, that a gentleman washed all over every
day. At first this bored him considerably, but after one day when the
Parson took him down to the cove to bathe, and he had occasion to be
ashamed of his grubby little legs and feet beside the other's shining
whiteness, that too altered. Yet the Parson had said nothing, hardly
given more than a look. In the same way, when he gathered that the