"I think so," answered Frank; "I might just as well be going there as loafing about on Sunday afternoon doing nothing."
Mr. Lloyd was very much pleased when he heard of Bert's success in getting Frank to the Sunday school. He recognised in Bert many of those qualities which make a boy a leader among his companions, and his desire was that his son's influence should always tell for that which was manly, pure, and upright. To get him interested in recruiting for the Sunday school was a very good beginning in church work, and Mr. Lloyd felt thankful accordingly.
Neither was he alone in feeling pleased and thankful. Mr. John Bowser, Frank's father, although he showed great indifference to both the intellectual and moral welfare of his boy, was, nevertheless, not opposed to others taking an interest in him. He cared too little about either church or Sunday school to see that Frank was a regular attendant. But he was very willing that somebody else should take an interest in the matter. Moreover, he felt not a little complacency over the fact that his son was chosen as a companion by Lawyer Lloyd's son. Engrossed as he was in the making of money, a big, burly, gruff, uncultured contractor, he found time somehow to acquire a great respect for Mr. Lloyd. He thought him rather too scrupulous and straightforward a man to be his lawyer, but he admired him greatly, nevertheless; and, although he said nothing about it, secretly congratulated himself upon the way things were going. He had little idea that the circle of influence Bert had unconsciously started would come to include him before its force would be spent.
CHAPTER XIII.
BERT AT HOME.
It was an article of faith in the Lloyd family that there was not a house in Halifax having a pleasanter situation than theirs, and they certainly had very good grounds for their belief. Something has already been told about its splendid view of the broad harbour, furrowed with white-capped waves, when of an afternoon the breeze blew in smartly from the great ocean beyond; of its snug security from northern blasts; of the cosy nook it had to itself in a quiet street; and of its ample exposure to the sunshine. But, perhaps, the chief charm of all was the old fort whose grass-grown casemates came so close to the foot of the garden, that ever since Bert was big enough to jump, he had cherished a wild ambition to leap from the top of the garden fence to the level top of the nearest casemate.
This old fort, with its long, obsolete, muzzle-loading thirty-two pounders, was associated with Bert's earliest recollection. His nurse had carried him there to play about in the long, rank grass underneath the shade of the wide-spreading willows that crested the seaward slope before he was able to walk; and ever since, summer and winter, he had found it his favourite playground.
The cannons were an unfailing source of delight to him. Mounted high upon their cumbrous carriages, with little pyramids of round iron balls that would never have any other use than that of ornament lying beside them, they made famous playthings. He delighted in clambering up and sitting astride their smooth, round bodies as though they were horses; or in peering into the mysterious depths of their muzzles. Indeed, once when he was about five years old he did more than peer in. He tried to crawl in, and thereby ran some risk of injury.
He had been playing ball with some of the soldier's children, and seemed so engrossed in the amusement that his mother, who had taken him into the fort, thought he might very well be left for a while, and so she went off some little distance to rest in quiet, in a shady corner. She had not been there more than a quarter of an hour, when she was startled by the cries of the children, who seemed much alarmed over something; and hastening back to where she had left Bert, she beheld a sight that would have been most ludicrous if it had not been so terrifying.