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school. The Rev. B. B. Gordon was a man by nature ill-suit-
ed to be a schoolmaster: he was impatient and choleric.
With no one to call him to account, with only small boys
to face him, he had long lost all power of self-control. He
began his work in a rage and ended it in a passion. He was
a man of middle height and of a corpulent figure; he had
sandy hair, worn very short and now growing gray, and a
small bristly moustache. His large face, with indistinct fea-
tures and small blue eyes, was naturally red, but during his
frequent attacks of anger it grew dark and purple. His nails
were bitten to the quick, for while some trembling boy was
construing he would sit at his desk shaking with the fury
that consumed him, and gnaw his fingers. Stories, perhaps
exaggerated, were told of his violence, and two years before
there had been some excitement in the school when it was
heard that one father was threatening a prosecution: he had
boxed the ears of a boy named Walters with a book so vio-
lently that his hearing was affected and the boy had to be
taken away from the school. The boy’s father lived in Ter-
canbury, and there had been much indignation in the city,
the local paper had referred to the matter; but Mr. Walters
was only a brewer, so the sympathy was divided. The rest
of the boys, for reasons best known to themselves, though
they loathed the master, took his side in the affair, and, to
show their indignation that the school’s business had been
dealt with outside, made things as uncomfortable as they
could for Walters’ younger brother, who still remained. But
Mr. Gordon had only escaped the country living by the skin
of his teeth, and he had never hit a boy since. The right the