“All except Tony.”
“Who is Tony?”
“He’s an Italian boy, and his father is away off.”
“Couldn’t you get him into your class?”
“I might try.”
“I will make the club an offer. If they will get five boys into school and keep them there two months, I will give them a banner.”
Charlie was delighted and promised to tell the boys in the club.
Mr. Walton here left Charlie and Aunt Stanshy, and went to his home. Aunt Stanshy greatly reverenced any one who led the worship of the congregation in the old church and encompassed such with a dignity-fence that was about as high as the famous steeple of old St. John’s, and that was a landmark for souls at sea.
Then there was a family mystery about Mr. Walton that fascinated Aunt Stanshy. He lived with his old white-haired mother, and there were hints and whispers that the two mourned over a once wayward and now absent member of the family. It leaked out that this was a son younger than Mr. Walton, and he had married a beautiful foreign lady whom the clergyman loved also, but had relinquished to the younger brother. This younger son was off somewhere on the sea, it was whispered; but he had a child ashore. On stormy days, it was noticed that the white-haired mother would watch the steeple, which consisted of a series of diminutive houses rising one above the other, as if ambitious to fly, but finally relinquishing the task into the hands or wings rather of a gilded weather-cock. The mother would watch the pigeons flying into their hiding-places in the steeple, seeking a refuge from the wild storm, and then her eyes would be lifted higher to the weather-vane, as if seeking for news about the sea-wind. Still higher went her thoughts—to God.
“She’s thinking of him, that son,” said the observant neighbors, who never knowingly gave up a chance to see something. To Aunt Stanshy this bit of mystery only made Mr. Walton all the more interesting.