SCHOOL DAYS
Vale gossip and of all sorts of helpful ways for young and old, but, above all, for children. It was he who bent the first pin with which Tom extracted his first stickleback out of "Pebbly Brook," the little stream which ran through the village. The first stickleback was a splendid fellow, with fabulous red-and-blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the taking of the first stickleback Benjy had carried off our hero to the canal, in defiance of Charity, and between them, after a whole afternoon's popjoying, they had caught three or four small, coarse fish and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half ounces each, which Tom bore home in rapture to his mother as a precious gift, and she received like a true mother with equal rapture, instructing the cook, nevertheless, in a private interview not to prepare the same for the squire's dinner. Charity had appealed against old Benjy in the mean time, representing the dangers of the canal banks; but Mrs. Brown, seeing the boy's inaptitude for female guidance, had decided in Benjy's favor, and from thenceforth the old man was Tom's dry-nurse. And as they sat by the canal watching their little green-and-white float, Benjy would instruct him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early days of the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in with a big stick in his hand and held the Petty Sessions by himself. How his great-uncle, the rector, had encountered and laid the last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith's apprentice, disguised in drink and a white sheet. It was Benjy, too, who saddled Tom's first pony and instructed him in the mysteries of horsemanship, teaching him to throw his weight back and keep his hand low; and who stood chuckling outside the door of the girls' school when Tom rode his little Shetland into the cottage and round the table where the old dame and her pupils were seated at their work.
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