"Aunt Charlotte's face," laughed Austin, sauntering up. "She looks as though you had been giving her absolution, Mr Sheepshanks—so beaming and refreshed. Why, what's it all about?"
"I expect you want more absolution than your aunt," said the vicar, humorously. "A sad useless fellow you are, I'm afraid. You and I must have a little serious talk together some day, Austin. I really want you to do something—for your own sake, you know. Now, how would you like to take a class in the Sunday-school, for instance? I shall have a vacancy in a week or two."
"Austin teach in the Sunday-school! He'd be more in his place if he went there as a scholar than as a teacher," said Aunt Charlotte, derisively.
"I don't know why you should say that," remarked Austin, with perfect gravity. "I think it would be delightful. I should make a beautiful Sunday-school teacher, I'm convinced."
"There, now!" exclaimed the vicar, approvingly.
Austin was standing under an apple-tree, and over him stretched a horizontal branch laden with ripening fruit. He raised his hands on either side of his head and clasped it, and then began swinging his wooden leg round and round in a way that bade fair to get on Aunt Charlotte's nerves. He was so proud of that leg of his, while his aunt abhorred the very sight of it.
"No doubt they're all very charming boys, and I should love to tell them things," he went on. "I think I'd begin with 'The Gods of Greece'—Louis Dyer, you know—and then I'd read them a few carefully-selected passages from the 'Phædrus.' Then, by way of something lighter, and more appropriate to their circumstances, I'd give them a course of Virgil—the 'Georgics', because, I suppose, most of them are connected with farming, and the 'Eclogues,' to initiate them into the poetical side of country life. When once I'd brought out all their latent sense of the Beautiful—for I'm afraid it is latent——"
"But it's a Sunday-school!" interrupted the vicar, horrified. "Virgil and the Phædrus indeed! My dear boy, have you taken leave of your senses? What in the world can you be thinking of?"
"Then what would you suggest?" enquired Austin, mildly.
"You'd have to teach them the Bible and the Catechism, of course," said Mr Sheepshanks, with an air of slight bewilderment.