To supply this
want by some means which should add also to his pleasure was Alethea's
first anxiety. Rowing would have answered every purpose, but
unfortunately there was no river at Roughborough.
Whatever it was to be, it must be something which he should like
as much as other boys liked cricket or football, and he must think the
wish for it to have come originally from himself; it was not very easy
to find anything that would do, but ere long it occurred to her that
she might enlist his love of music on her side, and asked him one
day when he was spending a half-holiday at her house whether he
would like her to buy an organ for him to play on. Of course, the
boy said yes; then she told him about her grandfather and the organs
he had built. It had never entered into his head that he could make
one, but when he gathered from what his aunt had said that this was
not out of the question, he rose as eagerly to the bait as she could
have desired, and wanted to begin learning to saw and plane so that he
might make the wooden pipes at once.
Miss Pontifex did not see how she could have hit upon anything
more suitable, and she liked the idea that he would incidentally get a
knowledge of carpentering, for she was impressed, perhaps foolishly,
with the wisdom of the German custom which gives every boy a
handicraft of some sort.
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