In return for this instruction in seamanship Frank taught Fred to ride, and riding was really an accomplishment of Frank's. It takes a plucky boy too to acquire the art of horsemanship with a Shetland pony, especially when, as Frank insisted, the learner had first to practise bare-back.
"You'll never get the grip with your knees else," he told him rightly enough; but this daft wee horse was probably just as difficult to ride before you knew his tricks and his manners as any to be met with in all Scotland.
However, Fred was declared master after a time, and then the pony became far more serious and manageable.
But this delightful holiday came to an end at last, and once more Mrs. Fielding took her lad south to a fresh school she had heard such good accounts of.
"Poor Frank!" said Eean, when he heard of it.
* * * * * *
Some people would have condemned the fisherman bard's plan of training Fred. I myself do not think it was wrong. He was certainly kept strictly to school, and his lessons were superintended by Eean himself at night; but then he had unbounded exercise, and he was also taught to work. Before he was fourteen years of age he was a fairly good carpenter, and could help to make a cask, while he knew all the mysteries of fish-curing.
Then he had his hobbies, namely, his music and his aquarium, and he had his amusements as well. The wild woods were his home, and on the sea he felt as safe as in his own bed in the fisherman's cottage.
Fisher folks are a very humble and unambitious people; but I really know no other class so innocent in their mode of life and manners. If Christianity flourishes anywhere in Scotland, it is in the obscure villages of honest fisher people.
Very superstitious they are, however; but surely there is no harm in this.