sunlit garden, with free birds twittering and flitting about it, and you
turn dull pain into shattering agony. The vicar's little study, with the
rows of books he had made me know and love with some small measure of his
own learning and passion, was the perch and seed-bowl of my cage, the
things in it, after my sweet mother and saucy Kate, that made life
possible, but still part of the cage, and it would have maddened me to hop
and twitter there in sight of free men with arms in their hands and
careers in front of them. Jack Dobson would march by, the sweetness of
life for Kate--little dreamed she that I knew it--but for me the
bitterness of death. Jack Dobson! I liked Jack, but not clinquant in
crimson and gold, with spurs and sword clanking on the hard, frost-bitten
road. I laughed at the idea; Jack Dobson, whom I had fought time and time
again at school until I could lick him as easily as I could look at him;
Jack Dobson, a jolly enough lad, who fought cheerily even when he knew a
sound thrashing was in store for him, but all his brains were good for was
to stumble through _Arma virumque cano_, and then whisper, "Noll, you
can fire a gun and shoot a man, but how can you sing 'em?" And because his
thin, shadowy, grasping father was a man of much outward substance and
burgess for the ancient borough, Jack was cornet in my Lord Brocton's
newly raised regiment of dragoons, this day marching with other of the
Duke of Cumberland's troops from Lichfield to Stafford. And for me, the
pride of old Bloggs for Latin and of all the lads for fighting, the most
stirring deed of arms available was shooting rabbits. So, consuming
inwardly with thoughts of my hard fate, I refused to go to the vicar's.
Mother should go. For her it would be a real treat, and Kate would be the
better under her quiet, seeing eyes.

"Well then," said Kate, "grump at home over your beastly Virgil." Mother,
who understood as only mothers can, said nothing, and prepared my
favourite dishes for dinner.