Then, of course, so many holiday boys were hard to keep in order.
Clement had a strong propensity in that direction; he was a grave,
quiet boy, without much sense of the absurd, and was generally the
victim of Edgar's wit; but, on the other hand, he was much in the
habit of objecting to anything Edgar or Fulbert proposed, and thereby
giving forbidden or doubtful amusements double zest. He was never
_in_ mischief, and yet he was never an element of peace.
All this, however, was mitigated when the holidays ended, and Lance
was allowed to follow his brothers to school, while Bobbie
importantly trotted in the wake of her sisters. Mamma and Cherry felt
it no small comfort to have no one at home who did not sleep away two
or three of the morning hours; and the lessons that the little girl
delighted to prepare for her father went on in peace--the arithmetic,
the French, the Latin, and even the verses of Greek Testament, that
he always said rested him.
And he was 'quite well,' he said himself; and though his wife never
confirmed this reply, he was everywhere as usual--in church, in
schools of all kinds, in parish meetings, by sick-beds, or in
cottages, as bright and as popular as ever, perhaps the more so that
he was more transparently thin, and every stranger started at the
sound of his cough, though the Bexley people had grown weary of
repeating the same augury for four or five years, and began, like 'my
Lady,' to call it 'constitutional.
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