Never see a wretched little
heavy-eyed mite sitting on the edge of a chair against your study wall
without saying to yourselves, "Perhaps this boy is he who, if I am not
careful, will one day tell the world what manner of man I was." If
even two or three schoolmasters learn this lesson and remember it, the
preceding chapters will not have been written in vain.
CHAPTER XXIX
SOON after his father and mother had left him Ernest dropped
asleep over a book which Mrs. Jay had given him, and he did not
awake till dusk. Then he sat down on a stool in front of the fire,
which showed pleasantly in the late January twilight, and began to
muse. He felt weak, feeble, ill at ease, and unable to see his way out
of the innumerable troubles that were before him. Perhaps, he said
to himself, he might even die, but this, far from being an end of
his troubles, would prove the beginning of new ones; for at the best
he would only go to Grandpapa Pontifex and Grandmamma Allaby, and
though they would perhaps be more easy to get on with than papa and
mamma, yet they were undoubtedly not so really good, and were more
worldly; moreover they were grown-up people- especially Grandpapa
Pontifex, who so far as he could understand had been very much
grown-up, and he did not know why, but there was always something that
kept him from loving any grown-up people very much- except one or
two of the servants, who had indeed been as nice as anything that he
could imagine.
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