The Life of Fred Archer 31 
his family. He often used to call at the King's Arms on 
business or pleasure, and he remembered Fred Archer's 
brothers and his sisters all in pinafores, and how they used to 
go about Prestbury with a donkey. 
The Superintendent must have found Cheltenham, and 
especially Prestbury, a change after the Spartan home from 
which he had come. There in the mornings the long family of 
lads and lasses waited round the porridge-bowl, spoon in 
hand, each ready to dip his or her implement into the national 
and common dish as soon as their father's long grace should 
be ended. 
They walked long miles to church on Sundays, where they 
attended two services with scarcely a break between them, 
and which lasted hours and hours. The blinds of the house 
were drawn down on Sundays, and if you had a girl, and met 
her out of doors, you had to walk on one side of the road while 
she walked on the other, and speak to her when nobody was in 
sight. Mrs. MacRae started her son off on the road south- 
wards with a carpet bag and two Bibles, one in English and the 
other in Gaelic. The latter volume was stolen en route by an 
English thief, who probably thought, said the Superintendent, 
that this book, written in a strange language and carried with 
little else in a carpet bag, was of great value from a worldly 
point of view. 
This innocent youth managed to hold his own, and later on 
had to keep order on the Cheltenham Racecourse and among 
skylarking Yeomanry officers, and his name stood for law and 
order in Cheltenham for many years. 
