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So I this day make a beginning of the same; albeit, as my cousin well knoweth, not from any vanity of authorship, or because of any undue confiding in my poor ability to edify one justly held in repute among the learned, but because my heart tells me that what I write, be it ever so faulty, will be read by the partial eye of my kinsman, and not with the critical observance of the scholar, and that his love will not find it difficult to excuse what offends his clerkly judgment.
Two years later the Macdonald Government passed an act authorizing the giving of scrip to the half-breeds of the North-West on the same terms as it had been given to those in Manitoba. So far so good. Then came year upon year of neglect, of clerkly procrastination, and of half-concessions.
At Eton, where a too-indulgent grandmother had placed him, he ransacked the desks of his school-fellows, and avenged a birching by emptying his master's pockets. Wherefore he lost the hope of a polite education, and instead of proceeding with a clerkly dignity to King's College, in the University of Cambridge, he was ignominiously apprenticed to a breeches-maker.
No, he did not but it shall be told.... And the white woman prevailed upon our father to make her man-child a Sahib and to let him go to the maktab and madressah-tul-Islam at Kot Ghazi, to learn the clerkly lore that gives no grip to the hand on the sword-hilt and lance-shaft nor to the thighs in the saddle, no skill to the fingers on the reins, no length of sight to the eye, no steadiness to the rifle and the lance, no understanding of the world and men and things.
Until the coming of gunpowder, the man on horseback commonly with some sort of armour was invincible in battle in the open. Wherever the land lay wide and unbroken, and the great lines of trade did not fall, there the horseman was master or the clerkly man behind the horseman. Such a land was aristocratic and tended to form castes.
He had evidently hesitated over his signature; there were one or two erasures; but at length he had written, his name firmly, without any attempt at a formal leave-taking. For perhaps a minute Toni stared at the two words "Leonard Dowson"; and a chill, as of anticipatory dread, swept over her at the sight of that firm, clerkly handwriting.
There was the packet left by the orderly to be called for by officers arriving on the Yuma stage, addressed in clerkly hand, but Sancho, alas! could not read. Hovering as near as the gravity and dignity of his station would permit, he had heard the colonel's query about Blake. He pricked up his ears at once. Teniente Blake! Thirty miles east on the Maricopa road! Why, how was this?
He would go into the harvest-field and work there when other tasks were not pressing, or use his clerkly hand to straighten up a neglected ledger; and his lively humor, as well as his industry, made him a welcome guest at any farm-house in the county. Whatever he might be doing, he was never too busy to help a neighbor. His strong arm was always at the service of the poor and needy.
All this Alleyne examined with curious eyes; but most interesting of all to him was a small ebony table at his very side, on which, by the side of a chess-board and the scattered chessmen, there lay an open manuscript written in a right clerkly hand, and set forth with brave flourishes and devices along the margins.
When the Presbytery assembled to receive a statement from Doctor Saunderson "re error in doctrine by a brother Presbyter," even a stranger might have noticed that its members were weighted with a sense of responsibility, and although a discussion arose on the attempt of a desultory member to introduce a deputy charged with the subject of the lost ten tribes, yet it was promptly squelched by the clerk, who intimated, with much gravity, that the court had met in hunc effectum, viz. to hear Doctor Saunderson, and that the court could not, in consistence with law, take up any other business, not even here Carmichael professed to detect a flicker of the clerkly eyelids the disappearance of the ten tribes.
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