51�Թ�

“It is a village school: your scholars will be only poor girls—cottagers’ children—at the best, farmers’ daughters.

The gentle manners and beauty of the cottagers greatly endeared them to me; when they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathised in their joys.

Revolutionary leader Samuel Adams put it well: “The cottager may beget a wise son; the noble, a fool. The one is capable of great improvement; the other, not.”

The leadership simply doesn’t know how it will exist without the cottagers tithing them millions.

It would now have been evident to both men that the object that they were rapidly closing in on was not some cottager’s wayward laundry but rather a human body—but whose body?