Ravenshoe. By Henry Kingsley.

20 RAVENSHOE.
CHAPTER IV.
FATHER MACKWORTH.
I HAVE noticed that the sayings and doings of young gentlemen
before they come to the age of, say seven or eight, are hardly
interesting to any but their immediate relations and friends. I
have my eye at this moment on a young gentleman of the mature
age of two, the instances of whose sagacity and eloquence are of
greater importance, and certainly more pleasant, to me, than the
projects of Napoleon, or the orations of Bright. And yet I fear
that even his most brilliant joke, if committed to paper, would fall
dead upon the public ear; and so for the present I shall leave
Charles Ravenshoe to the care of Norah, and pass on to some
others who demand our attention more.
The first thing which John Maclkworth remembered was his
being left in the loge of a French school at Rouen by an English
footman. Trying to push back his memory farther, he always
failed to conjure up any previous recollection to that. He had
certainly a very indistinct one of having been happier, and having
lived- quietly in pleasant country places with a kind woman who
talked English; but his first decided impression always remained
the same, - that of being, at six years old, left friendless, alone,
among twenty or thirty French boys older than himself.
His was a cruel, fate. He would have been happier apprenticed to a collier. If the man who sent him there had wished to
inflict the heaviest conceivable punishment on the poor, unconscious little innocent, he could have done no more than simply
left him at that school. We shall see how he found out at last
who his benefactor was.
English boys are sometimes brutal to one another (though not
so often as some wish to make out), and are always rough. Yet
I must say, as far as my personal experience goes, the French
boy is entirely master in the art of tormenting. He never
strikes; he does not know how to clench his fist. He is an
arrant coward, according to an English schoolboy's definition of
the: word; but at pinching, pulling hair, ear-pulling, and that
class of annoyance, all the natural ingenuity of his nation comes
out, and he is superb; add to this a combined, insolent, studied
sarcasm, and you have an idea of what a disagreeable French
schoolboy can be.
To say that the boys at poor John Mackworth's school put all