Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Brown had come home and assumed charge of operations. Ethel was weeping on the sofa in the library. "Oh, dear little William!" she sobbed. "I do wish I'd always been kind to him!" Mrs. Brown was reclining, pale and haggard, in the arm-chair. "There's the Roughborough Canal, John!" she was saying weakly. "And Joan's mother will always say it was our fault. Oh, poor little William!"
Theobald let them come, because Christina in a quiet, persistent way insisted on it; when they did come he behaved, as I have said, civilly, but he did not like it, whereas Christina did like it very much; she would have had half Roughborough and half Cambridge to come and stay at Battersby if she could have managed it, and if it would not have cost so much money: she liked their coming, so that she might make a new acquaintance, and she liked tearing them to pieces and flinging the bits over Ernest as soon as she had had enough of them.
He was happier even now than he had been at Battersby or at Roughborough, and he would not now go back, even if he could, to his Cambridge life, but for all that the outlook was so gloomy, in fact so hopeless, that he felt as if he could have only too gladly gone to sleep and died in his arm-chair once for all.
There was an institution at Roughborough called the monthly merit money; the maximum sum which a boy of Ernest's age could get was four shillings and sixpence; several boys got four shillings and few less than sixpence, but Ernest never got more than half-a-crown and seldom more than eighteen pence; his average would, I should think, be about one and nine pence, which was just too much for him to rank among the downright bad boys, but too little to put him among the good ones.
About the fifth of November it was a school custom to meet on a certain common not far from Roughborough and burn somebody in effigy, this being the compromise arrived at in the matter of fireworks and Guy Fawkes festivities.
Miss Pontifex spent the greater part of her holidays in London, and I also saw her at Roughborough, where I spent a few days, staying at the "Swan." I heard all about my godson in whom, however, I took less interest than I said I did.
He showed no aptitude for any particular branch of academic study, nevertheless he impressed his friends as being likely to make his mark. Just as he used reminiscences of his own schooldays at Shrewsbury for Ernest's life at Roughborough, so he used reminiscences of his own Cambridge days for those of Ernest.
He knew, and hummed or whistled to her all sorts of pieces out of the works of the great masters, which a boy of his age could hardly be expected to know, and it was evident that this was purely instinctive, inasmuch as music received no kind of encouragement at Roughborough. There was no boy in the school as fond of music as he was.
From that time she grew continually worse, and was never free from delirium till her death which took place less than a fortnight afterwards, to the inexpressible grief of those who knew and loved her. Letters had been written to Miss Pontifex's brothers and sisters, and one and all came post-haste to Roughborough.
He not only had never discarded his wig, but year by year it had edged itself a little more and a little more off red, till by the time he was forty, there was not a trace of red remaining, and his wig was brown. When Dr Skinner was a very young man, hardly more than five-and-twenty, the head-mastership of Roughborough Grammar School had fallen vacant, and he had been unhesitatingly appointed.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking