"Every day I spent in that school is burnt into my soul," he has often declared since.
He could not sleep at night nor play with the other boys, haunted as he was by the strange dread that he must have committed some unknown crime to be taken from home, torn from his young brother, and made a little captive in what seemed a fearful prison. The nights seemed endless, and were always awful. He whispered his fears on the fourth day to another Poplar boy who was there.
"Ah! you just wait until Sunday," said the other lad. "Every Sunday's like a fortnight."
When Sunday did come it proved to be one lasting agony. He thought time could not be made more terrible to children anywhere. They had dinner at twelve and tea at six, confined during the yawning interval in the dull day-room with nothing to do but to look at the clock, and then out of the window, and then back at the clock again.
During the week, after school hours, he hung about in abject misery all the time. From the day he went in to the day he left he never smiled. One afternoon he was loitering in the playground as the matron showed some visitors round.
"Who is that sad-faced boy?" he heard one of them ask.
"Oh, he's one of the new-comers," the matron answered. "He'll soon get over it."
The new-comer said to himself, "I wonder whether you would soon get over it if you had been taken from your mother and parted from a young brother?"
How long he stayed in the workhouse school he has never been able to tell. It could not have been very long in point of time, but to the sensitive lad it seemed an age. An indescribable burden was lifted from his shoulders when one day at dinner someone called him by his name.