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On a dreary, dull day, in the beginning of a bitter January, Mr. Ashurst arrived at Helmingham. He found the schoolhouse dirty, dingy, and uncomfortable, bearing traces everywhere of the negligence and squalor of its previous occupant; but the chairman of the governors, who met him on his arrival, told him that it should be thoroughly cleaned and renovated during the Easter holidays, and the mention of those holidays caused James Ashurst's heart to leap and throb with an intensity with which house-painting could not possibly have anything to do. In the Easter holidays he was to make Mary Bridger his wife, and that thought sustained him splendidly during the three dreary intervening months, and helped him to make head against a sea of troubles raging round him. For the task on which he had entered was no easy one. Such boys as had remained in the school under the easy rule of Dr. Munch were of a class much lower than that for which the benefits of the foundation had been contemplated by the benevolent old knight, and having been unaccustomed to any discipline, had arrived at a pitch of lawlessness which required all the new master's energy to combat. This necessary strictness made him unpopular with the boys, and at first with their parents, who made loud complaints of their children being "put upon," and in some cases where bodily punishment had been inflicted had threatened retribution. Then the chief tradespeople and the farmers, among whom Dr. Munch had been a daily and nightly guest, drinking his mug of ale or his tumbler of brandy-and-water, smoking his long clay pipe, taking his hand at whist, and listening, if not with pleasure, at any rate without remonstrance, to language and stories more than sufficiently broad and indecorous, found that Mr. Ashurst civilly, but persistently, refused their proffered hospitality, and in consequence pronounced him "stuck-up." No man was more free from class prejudices, but he had been bred in old Somerset country society, where the squirearchy maintained an almost feudal dignity, and his career in college had not taught him the policy of being on terms of familiarity with those whom Fortune had made his inferiors.