“Let’s go at him,” said Stillman Russell; “and tell him that he must stick up to them, and thrash the next one who insults him, and we’ll back him up. But if he don’t, we shan’t care anything about him and shall be ashamed of him.”
“That’s it; only leave the last part out, for that would break his heart, and it would be a falsehood for me to say I would not care anything about him,” said Bertie; “and let us also do another thing. James thinks everything of my grandfather; they talk together a great deal, when they are at work in the shop, and grandfather never will tell anything if you ask him not to. We’ll tell grandfather the whole story, and get him to stir James up. If grandfather tells James to defend himself, he’ll think it’s right, and he will, but as for us, we are but boys like himself.”
“It is not for such as me to make any disturbance. I didn’t go to school to make a disturbance. I went to learn,” was the reply of James to his aged adviser.
“Such as me,” replied the irate grandfather; “don’t ever use that phrase again. Haven’t I told you, time and again, that in this country, one man’s as good as another, provided he behaves as well; and if he don’t he is not. It’s the character, and not the nation, the blood, nor money, that makes a man here.”
“The boys in the school don’t seem to think so.”
“The most of ‘em do, and their parents do, and the most of their parents wouldn’t uphold ‘em in anything else. It is only a few rapscallions who are at the bottom of the whole thing. They are keeping the whole school in confusion, and taking the attention of the scholars off their lessons; and you are helping to keep it along by putting up with it. If they insult you without provocation, knock ‘em over, and they will be quiet as frogs, when a stone is flung into the pond.”
“It is not my place to strike and hurt boys whose fathers own land, when my father hadn’t any land; my mother went out to service and died in the workhouse, and was buried by the parish. If I was in England they would all call me a workhouse brat. Old Janet, my nurse, when she got mad used to say to me,—
“‘My grandfather was a hieland lord and my father was a hieland gentleman; but your mither was a servant girl, and your father was a hedger and ditcher, and out of nothing comes nothing, ye feckless bairn.’”
“Pshaw, it’s no fault of yours that your parents were poor and that you was born in a workhouse, nor disgrace neither; and it’s no merit of theirs that their fathers own land. It came about in the providence of God, who is no respecter of persons.”
“Is not a man who owns land, better than one who don’t?”