She put her hand on his shoulder.
Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar sometimes demonstrated affection.
"And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work." Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class held of their rulers and their education.
CHAPTER XI
THE STUDY
Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school in the hollow between the church and Rodmill.
New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot, where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will.
Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel. Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably.
The boys attended both.
Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in particular.