“Oh, you will,” said Aunt Gainor, giving me a great apple-dumpling.
“Take some molasses. Oh, as much as you please. I shall look away, as I
do when the gentlemen take their rum.”
You may be sure I obeyed her. As to much that she said, I was shocked;
but I never could resist a laugh, and so we made merry like children, as
was usual, for, as she used to say, “To learn when to laugh and when not
to laugh is an education.”
When my meal was over, and my stomach and my pockets all full, Aunt
Gainor bade me sit on her knees, and began to tell me about what fine
gentlemen were the Wynnes, and how foolish my grandfather had been to
turn Quaker and give up fox-hunting and the old place. I was told, too,
how much she had lost to Mr. Penn last night, and more that was neither
well for me to hear nor wise for her to tell; but as to this she cared
little, and she sent me away then, as far too many times afterward,
full of my own importance, and of desire to escape some day from the
threatened life of the ledger and the day-book.
At last she said, “You are getting too heavy, Hugh. Handsome Mrs.
Ferguson says you are too big to be kissed, and not old enough to kiss,”
and so she bade me go forth to the afternoon session of the academy.
After two weeks at the academy I got my first lesson in the futility
of non-resistance, so that all the lessons of my life in favour of this
doctrine were, of a sudden, rendered vain. We were going home in the
afternoon, gay and happy, Jack Warder to take supper with me, and to use
a boat my aunt had given me.
Near to High street was a vacant lot full of bushes and briers. Here the
elder lads paused, and one said, “Wynne, you are to fight.”