in Hammersmith; but he does not come into this story.

The Avories did not go to boarding school, or, indeed, to any school in the
ordinary way at all; Mrs. Avory said she could not spare them. Instead they
were visited every day except Saturdays by Mr. Crawley and Miss Bingham,
who taught them the things that one is supposed to know--Mr. Crawley taking
the boys in the old billiard room, and Miss Bingham the girls in the
morning room. At some of the lessons--such as history --they all joined.
The classes were attended also by the Rotherams, the doctor's children, who
lived at "Fir Grove," and Horace Campbell, the only son of the vicar. So it
was a kind of school, after all.

Horace Campbell had always intended to be a cowboy when he grew up, but a
visit to a play called "Raffles" was now rather inclining him to
gentlemanly burglary. William Rotheram, like Gregory, leaned towards
flying; but Jack Rotheram voted steadily for the sea, and talked of little
but Osborne.

Mary Rotheram played with a bat almost as straight as "Plum" Warner's, and
she knew most of the old Somersetshire songs-- "Mowing the Barley," and
"Lord Rendal," and "Seventeen come Sunday"--by heart, and sang them
beautifully. Gregory, who used to revel in Sankey's hymns as sung by Eliza
Pollard, the parlourmaid, now thought that the Somerset music was the only
real kind. Mary Rotheram had a snub nose and quantities of freckle and a
very nice nature.

"The Gables" had a large garden, with a shrubbery of evergreens in it and a
cedar. It was not at all a garden-party garden, because there was a
well-worn cricketpitch right in the middle of the lawn, and Gregory had a
railway system where the best flowers ought to be; but it was a garden full