Very likely the captain was too ultra in his views, but the question he argued is one which must be settled before the lapse of many years.
The shipmaster was a practical man, and he did not talk without acting. He believed in industrial education, not in the grammar-school,
but in place of the high-school. He had talked his views in town-meeting, and printed them in the papers; but the people were not inclined to adopt them.
A year before, he had taken a number of young men, and instructed them in seamanship and the construction and management of the marine engine. It was only a partial experiment, but he regarded it as an eminently successful one. Most of his pupils had obtained situations as engineers, and they were competent to fill them.
Captain Gildrock hoped to convince the people that his views were correct, and he was ready to spend his money in demonstrating the truth of what he preached. His class of the preceding year had been rather too old when he took them in hand. He wanted boys from the grammar-school, twelve or fourteen years old, before they had “bowed down to the vanity of this world,” before they had learned to be genteel, before they oiled their hair, and spent half an hour a day in adjusting their neckties.
After the death of his brother-in-law, the pilot, he had captured his nephew, after a hard struggle, and found he was the leading spirit of the Goldwing
Club, which had taken its name from Dory’s boat. These boys were rather wild, but not bad. The captain succeeded in gathering them all into the Beech-hill Industrial School, as he decided to call the new institution. But the boys in Genverres were shy of the new school, or their parents were shy for them. Not a few of the latter regarded the retired shipmaster as a sort of harmless lunatic, liberal with his money, but, like all reformers, an unsafe leader to follow.
Several boys from the high-school had made excellent records out in the world, and each fond parent expected his own son would join the galaxy of bright stars from its graduates. The captain could find only three boys in the whole town who would join the new school, while thirty went to the high-school. Possibly the requirement that the pupils should reside at Beech Hill had some influence with the parents.
It looked as though the school was to begin with eight pupils,—hardly enough to man the Sylph, the captain’s elegant steam-yacht, the largest and finest craft of the kind on the lake. All the boys in the high-school would have liked to flirt about the lake in the magnificent steamer;
but to do it as seamen, firemen, engineers, waiters, and cooks, was not wholly to the taste of the parents, if it suited that of the boys.