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I can see the schoolroom now, into which he took me, with its long rows of desks and forms, and bristling all round with pegs for hats and slates. Scraps of old copy-books and exercises littered the dirty floor, ink had been splashed everywhere, and the air of the place was indescribably dreary.
The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its desert of brickwork, full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of what any one thinks or feels about it, putting forth no claim, having no beauty, nor desirableness, pride, nor grace; yet neither asking for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous of better days; but, useful still, going through its own daily work, as some old fisherman, beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering human souls together underneath it; the sound of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents; and the grey peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the three that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore, the lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labour, and this for patience and praise.
Torbay, moreover, from the variety of its rocks, aspects, and sea-floors, where limestones alternate with traps, and traps with slates, while at the valley-mouth the soft sandstones and hard conglomerates of the new red series slope down into the tepid and shallow waves, affords an abundance and variety of animal and vegetable life, unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great Britain.
I had an opportunity of examining in the summer of 1863, together with the Reverend W.S. Symonds, a long and deep cutting made through this drift by the Alexandra Mining Company in search of slates.
If you examine one of these Welsh slates freshly broken, you will find its purple colour clear and vivid; and although never strikingly so after it has been long exposed to weather, it always retains enough of the tint to give rich harmonies of distant purple in opposition to the green of our woods and fields.
Everything was black, except that upon the roofs opposite the rising moon cast a glittering surface of light, and the chimney pots made slanting broad markings upon the silvered slates. The road was quite quiet but for the purring of a motor, and she could now, as her eyes were clearer, observe the outline of a large car drawn to the left of the door.
Even the drug store where mosquito dope and ice cream sodas had been sold now displayed a basket full of small sponges for the sanitary cleansing of slates. The faithless wretch who kept this store had put a small sign on the basket reading, "For the classroom." One and all, the merchants of Main Street had gone over to the Board of Education and all signs pointed to school.
Although it was a typical, hemmed-in New York house, you wouldn't have thought of calling the chimneys anything but pots, nor would you have called the shingles by any other name than slates. Joey was at home. He was expecting David, which accounts for the prompt appearance of the sprightly maid, and the genial shout of welcome from the top of the stairs.
It was two stories high, with a funny red mansard roof of oval slates. The interior was cut up into innumerable tiny rooms, some of them so small as to be hardly better than sleeping closets. In the back yard was a contrivance for pumping water from the cistern that interested McTeague at once.
And a few days later, when this had become stale, something happened which put a stop forever to Pelle's school attendance. The children were busy at arithmetic, chattering and clattering with their slates, and Fris was sitting as usual in his place, with his head against the wall and his hands resting on the desk.
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