as he peered after us.  All the village was out to see young Roddy Stone go off with his grand relative from London to call upon the Prince in his own palace.  The Harrisons were waving to me from the smithy, and John Cummings from the steps of the inn, and I saw Joshua Allen, my old schoolmaster, pointing me out to the people, as if he were showing what came from his teaching.  To make it complete, who should drive past just as we cleared the village but Miss Hinton, the play-actress, the pony and phaeton the same as when first I saw her, but she herself another woman; and I thought to myself that if Boy Jim had done nothing but that one thing, he need not think that his youth had been wasted in the country.  She was driving to see him, I have no doubt, for they were closer than ever, and she never looked up nor saw the hand that I waved to her.  So as we took the curve of the road the little village vanished, and there in the dip of the Downs, past the spires of Patcham and of Preston, lay the broad blue sea and the grey houses of Brighton, with the strange Eastern domes and minarets of the Prince’s Pavilion shooting out from the centre of it.

To every traveller it was a sight of beauty, but to me it was the world—­the great wide free world—­and my heart thrilled and fluttered as the young bird’s may when it first hears the whirr of its own flight, and skims along with the blue heaven above it and the green fields beneath.  The day may come when it may look back regretfully to the snug nest in the thornbush, but what does it reck of that when spring is in the air and youth in its blood, and the old hawk of trouble has not yet darkened the sunshine with the ill-boding shadow of its wings?

CHAPTER VII—­THE HOPE OF ENGLAND

My uncle drove for some time in silence, but I was conscious that his eye was always coming round to me, and I had an uneasy conviction that he was already beginning to ask himself whether he could make anything of me, or whether he had been betrayed into an indiscretion when he had allowed his sister to persuade him to show her son something of the grand world in which he lived.

“You sing, don’t you, nephew?” he asked, suddenly.

“Yes, sir, a little.”

“A baritone, I should fancy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And your mother tells me that you play the fiddle.  These things will be of service to you with the Prince.  Music runs in his family.  Your education has been what you could get at a village school.  Well, you are not examined in Greek roots in polite society, which is lucky for some of us.  It is as well just to have a tag or two of Horace or Virgil:  ‘sub tegmine fagi,’ or ’habet foenum in cornu,’ which gives a flavour to one’s conversation like the touch of garlic in a salad.  It is not bon ton to be learned, but it is a graceful thing to indicate that you have forgotten a good deal.  Can you write verse?”