As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he didn't care to use them.
"He's a little gentleman though—like his father," ended the schoolmaster.
Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us. As an honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while money was very little to him. But for the mysterious quality of breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence of something finer than ourselves. And on the rare occasions in which Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice—"There's English for you! Don't you wish you could talk like that...?"
Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it never failed to do.
"That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly. "But Ern's got to make his own way in the world."
"He'll do," said Mr. Pigott. "He won't be forgotten, you'll see. He's a good lad, and that's something even in these days."
And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he excelled. Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike him in his marked athletic capacity.
True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was disliked by everybody and gloried in it. He won all the gilt-edged prizes, while Ern took the canings.
Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home.
"Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening. "They fairly sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"