11
 
 THE 
 
 BOYS OF AXLEFORD
 
 Frontispiece. 
 
 P. i
 
 THE BOYS OF 
 AXLEFORD 
 
 BY CHARLES CAMDEN p 
 
 AUTHOR OF "WHEN i WAS YOUNG" 
 
 Q. \VeuJ c j 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY 
 
 FKTT1E, HOUGHTON, FRASER, MAHONEY, WALKER 
 AND FRENCH 
 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS 
 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL 
 
 NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET 
 1880
 
 MONTHLY MAGAZINES FOR THE 
 HOUSEHOLD. 
 
 EVERY BOY'S MAGAZINE . 
 EVERY GIRL'S MAGAZINE 
 . . JLlTf LE, WIJDE-AWAKE ... 
 . . . . '., , ,,..,,' J ^ ; 
 
 . 6d. 
 . 6d.
 
 PZ.7 
 
 at fc> 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. FIBBING BILL I 
 
 II. SULKY SAM 1J 
 
 III. DASHING GEORGE 33 
 
 IV. SHY DICK 50 
 
 V. LAZY TOM 62 
 
 VI. FUNNY PAT 76 
 
 VII. BLUSTERING FRED . . . . '...." 94' 
 
 VIII. HONEST NED . . ."if? 
 
 * . , J 
 
 IX. PALTRY, PETER/ ; ., . . .* 131 
 
 X. JOLLY JIM .'..'. . . . 155 
 
 * 
 
 XI. TRUANT JACK 169 
 
 XII. SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN . . . IQ7 
 
 48299 1 :
 
 I. 
 
 FIBBING BILL. 
 
 AXLEFORD SCHOOL was a nice 
 warm-looking old place, with twisted 
 chimneys, and windows in all kinds of funny 
 places in its red walls, that were as ripe as 
 red apples, and in its grey roof-ridge's,' that 
 were like ever so many little ranges of moun- 
 
 * * 
 
 tains; and it looked out over a green paddock 
 
 
 
 that almost bulged over a sloping mossy wall, 
 like a plump lady's instep over her shoe, on 
 to a winding country lane that led down to 
 the village of Axleford. I suppose the village 
 was called so because the little stream that ran 
 across the lane came up to the axles of the carts
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 and waggons that forded it. There was a little 
 wooden bridge for foot-passengers. Elms and 
 chestnut trees grew along the wall of the school 
 paddock, and almost covered the lane with their 
 spreading branches. All round about the school 
 there were woods and meadows, corn-fields 
 and turnip-fields. On the side of the paddock 
 nearest Axleford there was a great pond, that 
 we could bathe in and fish in in warm weather, 
 and skate and slide on in cold. There was a 
 leaky old punt on it, too, that belonged to the 
 schpol-house. AncJ close by the school there 
 
 * 
 
 was a* ruined old gfey "church, with* b/ushy ivy 
 growing all about it, and- no end of t birds' nests 
 in its walls; and a big old farmyard, full of 
 empty barns, and . cart-lodges, and stables, and 
 cow-houses, and cattle-sheds, formed part of the 
 school premises. Most of the boys who went to 
 school at Axleford thought it a very jolly place. 
 I was there for a good many years, and am going 
 to tell you something about some of my school-
 
 FIBBING BILL. 
 
 mates, good and bad. They won't mind my 
 telling tales out of school now. A good many 
 of them, perhaps, are not left to mind. I shall 
 call them, at starting, names that papa, and 
 mamma, and the girls, and the " kids " can un- 
 derstand, but you and I know that boys aren't 
 called like that at school. So I shall give their 
 proper nicknames too. 
 
 Fibbing Bill, for instance, we called Crammer. 
 He wasn't a bad sort of fellow in some things, 
 but then he did tell such awful lies. He was 
 so fond of getting into scrapes that at first you 
 thought him plucky, but he always tried to get 
 out of his scrapes by a fib of some kind, and 
 therefore you couldn't respect Crammer long. 
 There are some scrapes that it is almost natural 
 for you youngsters to get into (you wouldn't be 
 youngsters, but precocious grandpapas, if you 
 didn't get into them), and there are some scrapes 
 you have no business whatever to get into ; but, 
 
 whichever kind you do get into, don't back out 
 
 1 2
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 of them by telling a lie, but take the conse- 
 quences like men. Though it is a good many 
 years since I had the cane, I can remember how 
 it cuts when it comes down with a whistle on the 
 palm and ddubles.back on the knuckles ; but it is 
 far better to have weals on your hands for weeks, 
 than to hear conscience saying, " Oh, you mean 
 little beggar!" when the lights are out in the 
 bed-room, and the chaps that liave got caned are 
 snoring as comfortably as pigs, because they 
 have no fear of being found out, after all, on the 
 morrow. 
 
 One of the stables in the farmyard was our 
 menagerie. We kept guinea-pigs and ferrets 
 there, and they kept away the rats. And we 
 kept rabbits, and a hedgehog, and a young fox, 
 and three squirrels, and two ravens ; pigeons and 
 doves, two or three magpies and starlings (whose 
 tongues we had split with a thin sixpence, and 
 yet they wouldn't talk) ; linnets and goldfinches, 
 and bullfinches, and canaries; blackbirds, and
 
 FIBBING BILL. 5 
 
 thrushes, and larks ; half a dozen puppies, and 
 white mice, and field-mice, and dormice, and a 
 mole; a newt in a porter-bottle, and a bowl of 
 goldfish, that were always dying; and some 
 snakes, like whip-thongs made of different co- 
 loured ribbons, that were always dying too, or 
 else crawling away, just when we thought that 
 we had tamed them; and I don't know how 
 many newspaper-trayfuls of silkworms, and 
 ever so many more things that I can't remember 
 now. 
 
 Crammer was a rabbit-fancier. He had one 
 big buck that he was especially proud of a 
 great, ugly, white-and-sandy fellow, as long as 
 a hare, and ever so much fatter. Poor Bill used 
 to tell crams about his rabbits, as he did about 
 everything else, and he said that he had given 
 five shillings for this old buck. He had bought 
 it at Dulchester, from a man of the name of 
 Blater, who sold rock, and brandy-balls, and 
 things of that kind, in a stall in the High Street
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 on market-days, and kept a bird and rabbit-shop 
 in one of the back lanes. 
 
 We soon found out from Blater what Crammer 
 had paid for his rabbit; but that made no dif- 
 ference to Bill. He maintained as at first that 
 he had paid five shillings, and bragged that he 
 must understand rabbits a great deal better than 
 Blater did, or else he wouldn't have been able to 
 get such a pearl amongst bucks for so ridiculously 
 low a price. Crammer called his buck Pearl. The 
 rest of us called him Saturn, because, whenever 
 he got the chance, he used to eat up his little ones. 
 Nobody but his master could see anything in 
 Pearl, except his bigness; but Crammer used to 
 talk as if he was doing us a great favour when 
 he lugged the big beast out of the hutch by his 
 ugly, short, stiff ears (they hadn't a mite of lop 
 in them), and let him hobble about on the stable 
 floor, stopping to rest, and pant, and sit down 
 every half-minute, just like a pursy, gouty old 
 gentleman. We used to show our live stock
 
 FIBBING BILL, 
 
 against one another's, just as, I dare say, you do 
 now; and so do the grown-up costermongers in 
 Bethnal Green, and the grown-up farmers at the 
 Agricultural Hall. We grown-up people do much 
 the same as you boys do ; only, somehow, we 
 can't manage to be so jolly over it. 
 
 One morning, however, when we ran into the 
 stable as usual as soon as we were up, one of the 
 fellows called out, "Look here, Bill! what's the 
 matter with your buck?" When Crammer did 
 look, lie was almost mad with rage, for Pearl 
 was lying on his side, with his legs out and body 
 swelled up like a bladder, quite dead. Poor 
 Crammer could hardly help crying. We were 
 very sorry for him at first, though we didn't think 
 much of his rabbit. We were looking at the bits 
 of stalks left in the hutch to see what the buck 
 had been eating to poison him, when Crammer 
 began to accuse us of killing it out of jealousy 
 and spite. Then he began to blubber. Of course 
 we couldn't help pitying him a bit, but we were
 
 8 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 very angry that he should dare to accuse us of 
 such a mean thing as that. It was just his ac- 
 cusing us this way that made us suspect him 
 afterwards, when another rabbit died. 
 
 A little time after this, one of the chaps bought 
 a real beauty of Blater. It was a white and black 
 buck as white as ermine and as glossy black as 
 jet and it had a regular butterfly smut. You 
 might have fancied that a black butterfly had 
 lighted on its nose. It had regular lop-ears, too 
 not oar-lop, or single lop but both hung down 
 like a King Charles's spaniel's ears. Even Cram- 
 mer admitted at first that it was pretty good, and 
 tried to buy it. When he couldn't get it, he made 
 out that it wasn't worth much ; but it was easy 
 to see that he was .quite savage because it wasn't 
 his. It was such a very handsome buck that we 
 called it Paris. Well, one evening we had been 
 rung into school to write our exercises. Crammer 
 sat next to me, and he came in rather late, and 
 I noticed that he looked very queer, and got his
 
 FIBBING BILL. 
 
 exercise-book and his dictionary out of his loqker 
 in a great hurry, and began to scribble away a 
 good deal faster than he generally did. Presently, 
 one of the little fellows found that he had left a 
 book in the stable, and asked leave to go and 
 fetch it. He came back quite pale, and as soon 
 as he got inside the door he called out to the 
 usher, 
 
 " Please, sir, one of the ferrets has got out, and 
 is sucking Smith's buck." 
 
 Smith didn't wait to ask leave, but jumped 
 over the form, and rushed off to the stable. He 
 soon came back, carrying poor Paris dead in his 
 arms. Everybody looked up except Crammer. 
 He went on as if he did not know anything had 
 happened. 
 
 The usher began to make inquiries. 
 
 " I choked the little brute off," said Smith, 
 " but it was too late. It was my ferret, and how 
 it could get out I don't know. I 'm certain the 
 cage could only be opened from the outside so
 
 io THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 the ferret must have got out first, before it could 
 let itself out" 
 
 We couldn't help laughing at that Smith 
 was always making speeches of that sort ; but 
 we were very sorry for him all the same ; and 
 I couldn't help believing that Crammer knew 
 something about the matter. By-and-bye, as if 
 he had just found out what all the disturbance 
 was about, he looked up and said, 
 
 " Oh, yes, ferrets often get out of their cages ; 
 Blater's do he told me so only he keeps his 
 with their mouths sewn up." 
 
 " How can he feed them ?" asked Smith. 
 
 " Well, / don't know anything about your 
 rabbit," answered Crammer ; " I haven't been in 
 the stable since dinner-time." 
 
 "Who said you had ?" said Smith; and \ve 
 all looked at Crammer very suspiciously. 
 
 The usher noticed that his pocket-handkerchief 
 was twisted round one of his fingers, and asked 
 him what was the matter with it.
 
 FIBBING BILL. it 
 
 " I Ve cut it, sir." 
 
 "What with?" 
 
 ' With a knife." 
 
 " Please, sir, I picked up this knife just under 
 Smith's ferret-cage," said the little boy who had 
 been in the stable. 
 
 Crammer looked very scared when the usher 
 said, " Why, this is your knife, Bunting : here is 
 your name on the handle ;" but a moment after 
 he cried out, as if he had made a great discovery, 
 
 " Then Francis Minor must have let the ferret 
 out, sir. I haven't had that knife for a fortnight, 
 and I always thought he prigged it. Don't you 
 see, sir, the little blade 's broken ? He must have 
 done that when he was untwisting the wires." 
 
 We were almost certain now that it was Cram- 
 mer that had got the ferret out and put him into 
 the rabbit-hutch, and we were quite certain when 
 the usher made him take the handkerchief off 
 his finger, and we saw that the wound in it was 
 far more like a bite than a knife-cut. But Cram-
 
 12 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 mer still declared that he knew nothing about 
 the ferret. He didn't stammer or turn red : as 
 often as not those are signs that a fellow is inno- 
 cent. He prated away like a Cheap Jack, and 
 we did not believe one word he said. We were 
 specially angry that he should be mean enough 
 to throw the blame on poor little Francis Minor. 
 
 Of course it is just possible that Crammer 
 didn't put Smith's ferret into Smith's hutch, but 
 I don't think that we did wrong in sending him 
 to Coventry for the rest of the half; and that 
 and his conscience together (if he was guilty, as 
 I am sure he was) must have been worse than a 
 dozen canings. 
 
 When Bill came back next half, I do believe 
 that he tried sometimes to keep from fibbing ; 
 but I Ve known him tell a fib, out of habit, when 
 there was nothing to be gained by it ; and if he 
 had thought a moment, he must have been sure 
 no one could believe him. If a fellow is left- 
 handed, you know, it 's a precious long time
 
 FIBBING BILL, 13 
 
 before he can learn to bowl with his right, and 
 when he has partly got into the way of it, he is 
 apt every now and then to take the ball in his 
 left Well, it 's much the same when you have 
 let yourself grow left-handed in your talk. But 
 at last Bill got a scare that did him good. 
 
 It was just before the Christmas holidays. 
 The fields were all covered with snow, and Bill 
 and some other fellows were out in one of them, 
 rolling over a great dumpling that they meant to 
 carve into a snow-man when it was big enough. 
 It grew so heavy at last that they had to call 
 for help to turn it over. One of the chaps who 
 ran up was a little fellow we used to call Miss 
 Jemima for a joke, because he had long curls 
 like a girl, and his collars had borders that the 
 laundry-woman was obliged to Italian-iron ; but 
 that was his mamma's fault, and not his ; and 
 Miss Jemima, though we did call him so, was a 
 plucky fellow enough. 
 
 When the new-comers put their backs and
 
 14 THE BO YS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 their shoulders to the ball, it soon began to 
 roll over again, until it came to the brink of a 
 deep frozen ditch with pollards on the banks ; 
 some of them looked like worn-out brooms, and 
 some, that had snow on the top, like great drum- 
 sticks. There the other fellows got tired, and left 
 Crammer and Miss Jemima to make the snow- 
 man. Miss Jemima, as we found out afterwards, 
 scrambled up to the top of the ball, and Crammer, 
 for a lark, gave it a jog. It was just on the ledge 
 of the ditch, and over it went crash through the 
 ice ! It blocked up the great hole.it made, and 
 when Crammer couldn't see anything of Miss 
 Jemima, he thought that the little fellow must 
 be drowning down below in the cold black water. 
 He was in an awful fright, and ran back to the 
 school shouting out for help. Plenty of help 
 rushed back with him to the ditch, but even then 
 he couldn't tell the truth. He said that the little 
 fellow had scooped away the snow on the other 
 side of the ball to make it tumble into the ditch,
 
 FIBBING BILL. 
 
 and that whilst he was doing so the ball had 
 fallen in, taking him down with it The masters, 
 and the boys, and the servants broke up the ice 
 in the ditch, and prodded everywhere with poles, 
 but they couldn't find poor Miss Jemima. At 
 last we thought that his body must have been 
 carried down into the pond, but how it could 
 have got there so soon (though the ditch was 
 more like a rivulet than a common ditch) was a 
 mystery. Anyhow, we made sure that we should 
 never see Miss Jemima alive again. The Doctoi 
 sent into Dulchester for drags, and employed 
 every man he could lay hands on to break up 
 the pond ; but nothing had been seen of the 
 little fellow when at last we were rung into the 
 school-room to late evening prayers. When the 
 prayers were half over, in tottered Miss Jemima, 
 as pale as a ghost, and with a streak and smear 
 of clotted blood upon his forehead ; and up from 
 his knees jumped Crammer, crying, "Oh! don't 
 hurt me ! I didn't mean to do it."
 
 16 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 If Crammer had not told a lie about the way 
 in which the accident happened, Miss Jemima 
 would have been looked for on the other side of 
 the ditch as well as in it ; and there he would 
 have been found lying-, stunned and bleeding, 
 behind a ploughshare, against which he had been 
 hurled. As things were, Miss Jemima had to 
 spend his Christmas holidays at Axleford, raving 
 in fever ; and when we came back, his mamma 
 was still with him, and the poor little chap was 
 as thin and as weak as a starved mouse. Cram- 
 mer came back with us, though the Doctor had 
 vowe ^ he would expel him. But Miss Jemima's 
 mamma, though she did still have his collars 
 Italian-ironed (he had no long curls left), had 
 kindly asked the Doctor to give Bill another 
 chance, because her little boy had asked her to 
 do so ; and before he left Axleford, new boys 
 couldn't make out why Bill Bunting was still 
 called Crammer. Names will stick, you know, 
 long after they have ceased to be deserved.
 
 II. 
 
 SULKY SAM. 
 
 THE first time I saw Bear's Cub that was 
 our nickname for sulky Sam Thompson 
 was the first time I ever went into the school-room 
 at Axleford. He was a little chap then not 
 much bigger than I was and he had only been 
 at school a few hours longer than I had been ; 
 but his school godfathers and godmothers (for 
 the needlewoman and the servants thought him 
 as grumpy as the fellows did) had already given 
 him that name. He looked as if he deserved it. 
 Some of the chaps wanted him to come out and 
 play, instead of moping over his locker ; but he 
 wouldn't say a word to them, and, when at last 
 they pulled the form from under him, he still
 
 t8 THE BOYS OF AXLLkURD. 
 
 clung to the desk, without saying a word, but 
 looking just as sulky as a young bear. It wasn't 
 as if he was sorry at leaving home. It 's natural 
 enough for a little fellow to feel a bit down- 
 hearted the first time he goes to a large school, 
 and sees nothing but strange places and strange 
 faces about him. But Bear's Cub wasn't like 
 that. He wouldn't go out, just because the other 
 fellows wanted him to go out. Well, just the kind 
 of fellow he was then, I am sorry to say he con- 
 tinued to be all the time I knew him or rather 
 he grew worse, for nothing grows on any one like 
 sulkiness, if you let it grow, instead of trying to 
 shake yourself out of it. Of course, whilst he was 
 a little fellow, his sulks got him plenty of teasing 
 and drubbings too ; but when he was too big to 
 have forms pulled from under him, or his back 
 " warmed " with a knotted pocket-handkerchief, 
 he wasn't a bit more respected. We called him 
 Old Bear's Cub, instead of Young Bear's Cub 
 that was the only difference.
 
 P. 18
 
 SULKY SAM. 19 
 
 I will tell you how he behaved one holiday, 
 when he was still Young Bear's Cub. 
 
 In most of the story-books about schoolmasters 
 that I have read, they are made out to be great 
 beasts. I don't think that is quite fair. If school- 
 masters wrote story-books, perhaps they would 
 have more reason to make out that all school- 
 boys are plaguesome little beasts ; though that 
 wouldn't be fair either. Both schoolboys and 
 schoolmasters have good as well as bad amongst 
 them. Our Doctor was one of the good ones. 
 " Doctor " sounds as if a man must be grey and 
 grim, but our Doctor was not old, and he was 
 quite a jolly fellow. He seemed to like play 
 just as well as we did cricket, and football, 
 and hockey on the ice, and chevy, and hare-and- 
 hounds, and stag-warning. Of course he wasn't 
 a " dunce at syntax," but he was a " dab at taw." 
 He would even play at leap-frog, and set low 
 backs for the little fellows. He was a capital 
 rider, and could row, and swim, and skate, and
 
 20 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 shoot, and knew ever so much besides Latin 
 and Greek and mathematics about birds, and 
 weasels, and fire balloons, and things like that : 
 so we thought a great deal of the Doctor. But, 
 perhaps, what made us like him most was because 
 he seemed almost as fidgety as we were at having 
 to stay in school on very fine days. Every now 
 and then, after we had been rung in, he would 
 give us a sudden holiday in fine weather, and 
 take us for a scamper across country. 
 
 Well, one glorious spring morning we had 
 been rung in, and my class was pretending to 
 be very busy over Omnis Gallia est divisa (we 
 had just begun Caesar) ; but with the sun shining 
 in as it did on the hacked old desk, making it 
 quite hot, we found it very hard to take any in- 
 terest in Omnis Gallia. Gaul might have been 
 divided into fifty thousand parts for anything 
 we cared. We rather wished, indeed, that it had 
 been broken up into so many little bits that they 
 could not have been picked up to bother us.
 
 SULKY SAM. 
 
 21 
 
 Instead of looking out words in our dictionaries, 
 we took to drawing pictures in them. There 
 were so many names cut on the desk, and so 
 much ink had been splashed over it, and so 
 many faces and figures had been drawn there 
 already, that there was not room for any more ; 
 so we drew our designs on the fly-leaves of our 
 dictionaries etchings something like this 
 
 (mind, young gentlemen, I am not holding them 
 up in any way as models.} And then we looked 
 out of window, and the willow- warblers were
 
 22 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 having such a spree about the elms on the other 
 side of the paddock, that it really seemed as if 
 they were doing it to show off and plague us, 
 because we were kept in, whilst they were so 
 jolly. The little fellows in their brown dress- 
 coats and white waistcoats were behaving as if 
 the sunshine had got into their heads. They 
 chased one another round the tops of the trees, 
 and jumped up from swaying twigs like Clowns 
 from springing-boards. They seemed to have so 
 much life in them that they didn't know how to 
 live fast enough. They were a tantalizing sight 
 for little schoolboys expected to get up the first 
 chapter of Caesar. Just, however, as we were 
 settling down to Omnis Gallia in earnest (fear- 
 ing that, if we didn't, we shouldn't get out all 
 day), in came the Doctor, with a "put-away- 
 your-books " look on his face. 
 
 "Well, boys," he said, "we Ve had rather dis- 
 agreeable weather lately " he always made some 
 excuse like that " and, perhaps, a little fresh air
 
 SULKY SAM. 23 
 
 won't do any of us any harm. So we '11 put off 
 business till the afternoon. Put away your books, 
 and we '11 start for D'Arcy Tower." 
 
 In a second the lockers had gobbled up all the 
 books, not to come out again until evening school 
 we soon learnt what the Doctor's " afternoon " 
 meant and out we tumbled round him like 
 .hounds round a huntsman. He generally was the 
 only master who went with us on these holiday 
 scampers. The under-masters could go or stay 
 as they liked ; and almost always they " elected," 
 as the Yankees say, to stay. 
 
 I was in the same class with Bear's Cub then, 
 and we ran out of school together. Bear's Cub, for 
 a wonder, was in a good temper, and a greater 
 wonder still he kept in a good temper until we 
 had almost got out of Axleford. A bear with 
 a sore head, though, might have been good- 
 tempered that morning. When we tramped over 
 the little bridge at Axleford (making as great a 
 clatter as we could on the loose old planks), the
 
 24 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 willows were all hung with yellow catkins, and 
 little fish were leaping up from the water as if 
 they had been just let out from school like us, 
 and the little sedge-warblers were chattering like 
 a parcel of girls, and playing hide-and-seek in 
 the rushes, and swinging on the reeds with their 
 heads down, like little acrobats. The people in 
 the village looked as if they would like a holiday 
 too. Mrs. Smith, who sold sugar and soap, and 
 tea and tin pots, and mops and mousetraps, and 
 brooms and blacking-brushes, and grindstones 
 and gunpowder, and lanterns and lucifer-matches 
 and lollipops, was standing at her shop door, 
 smoothing out her apron, and she gave us a grin 
 as we went by. The blacksmith and his man 
 stopped hammering as we passed the forge, and 
 leaned their chins on their hammer-handles to 
 get a good stare at us ; and the parson's groom, 
 who had brought down his master's horse to be 
 shod, touched his hat to the Doctor, and then 
 said to the blacksmith,
 
 SULKY SAM. 
 
 " What a sight o* 'olidays them young gents 
 gits!" 
 
 " I hopes their parents likes it," growled the 
 surly old blacksmith. 
 
 But what did we care what he said ? We only 
 told Bear's Cub to make a bow to his uncle. 
 He generally turned doubly sulky when we told 
 him that the old blacksmith must be his uncle ; 
 but, as I have said, he was in a wonderful good 
 temper that morning. The wheelwright was a 
 nice old fellow : he let us use his tools some- 
 times, and helped us to shape our ships. He 
 was standing in front of his cottage on the 
 little green littered with white chips and yellow 
 shavings painting a waggon blue and red. One 
 of the fellows gave Bear's Cub a shove up against 
 it. He should not have done so, of course ; but, 
 after all, Bear's Cub only got a little paint on 
 his face and hands so it was not worth while 
 making a to-do about. But Sam turned sulky at 
 once, and when old Chips said that lie had more
 
 26 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 reason to look black, and the fellow that had 
 shoved him said, for a joke (schoolboys' jokes, 
 you know, are not always very brilliant), that 
 Sam looked blue, Bear's Cub marched off by 
 himself, and wouldn't have another word to say 
 to us. It didn't hurt us, but it couldn't have been 
 very pleasant for him. That is the mistake sulky 
 folks make. Nobody cares for their sulks they 
 are only punishing themselves. 
 
 Every now and then we had a cut across the 
 fields, but Bear's Cub trudged on by the road, 
 walking through all the puddles as \tthat would 
 serve us out ! Such a jolly scamper we had. 
 Perhaps we didn't think much then about the 
 beauty of the thing* all around us, but they are 
 beautiful to remember now. The bees were out, 
 and a white butterfly or two, and white long- 
 legged lambs were butting at their mothers in 
 grass that you seemed to hear growing, sprinkled 
 all over with buttercups and daisies. There were 
 primroses on the hedge-banks and in the damp
 
 SULKY SAM. 
 
 cracks of the mossy rotten old stiles and gate- 
 posts. The blackthorns were in blossom in the 
 hedges, and the plum trees and cherry trees in 
 the orchards ; and golden daffodils were nodding 
 in the cottage gardens, and great patches in the 
 woods were as blue as the sky with wild hyacinths. 
 The chaffinches were singing in the orchards, and 
 pruning their striped wings and their red breasts 
 with their blue bills. Every now and then we 
 heard the cuckoo ; and the skylarks, ever so high 
 up, were singing as if they would break a blood- 
 vessel. But what we cared most for then was the 
 birds' nests ; and we found a titmouse's. School- 
 boys do not think much of a tell-tale-tit, but 
 they think a good deal of a long-tailed tit, and 
 we were very proud of our find. I think, however, 
 that it served us right to get our hands scratched 
 as we did in pulling the nest out of the bush. 
 The titmice must have had so much trouble in 
 bringing all that moss and wool and cobweb to- 
 gether, putting such a neat arched roof upon
 
 28 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 their home, making such a funny little doorway 
 in its side, whitewashing it with lichen, and fur- 
 nishing it with a soft feather bed. 
 
 But of course we didn't think like that then. 
 We exulted over our spoil, and thought Bear's 
 Cub (if we thought of him at all) a moping muff 
 to be trudging along the road all by himself, 
 when he might have been present at such a 
 capture. And so I still think he was. Well, at 
 last we got to D'Arcy Tower all that is left of 
 D'Arcy Hall. At least the other parts are turned 
 into stables and barns, and cow-houses and cart- 
 lodges. The low farmhouse built on to the Tower 
 is pretty old, but it is not nearly so old as the 
 Tower, and yet it looks as if it wouldn't last half 
 so long. There are eight storeys in the brick 
 Tower, and you go up it by a winding staircase 
 lighted with little pointed windows ; and sparrows 
 and jackdaws and starlings build in the ivy that 
 almost covers up the little windows, and from the 
 top you can see for miles round meadows and
 
 SULKY SAM. 29 
 
 fields, and woods and marshes, farmhouses and 
 churches, and rivers and the sea with ships on it. 
 The Tower was a jolly place to climb about, and, 
 besides the other birds, two great owls lived in 
 the dark cobwebby room half-way up ; and once 
 one of the big fellows got a little owl out of their 
 nest, though it was dangerous work, for the floor 
 was as rotten as thawing ice in some places, and 
 the owls flew at him, and tried to peck his eyes 
 out. 
 
 D'Arcy Tower, however, was a long way from 
 Axleford, and we were very hungry, as well as 
 rather tired, when we got there. So the Doctor 
 went into the farmhouse to have a talk with the 
 farmer, and presently we were called into a long 
 broad low kitchen, with a brick floor, and a wood 
 fire on the hearth, and we sat down on any seats 
 that we could find, and lunched off home-made 
 bread, and a cheese almost as big as a cart-wheel : 
 the little fellows had new milk, and the big fel- 
 lows home-brewed ale.
 
 30 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 Whilst we were enjoying ourselves, Bear's Cub 
 limped up and peeped in ; but instead of coming 
 in to get some grub himself, the stupid turned 
 away, and went and sat down on the wall of the 
 well. There he sat moping whilst we finished 
 our lunch, and there he sat moping whilst we 
 swarmed like ants over the Tower and the farm 
 buildings. 
 
 "Yer may git as many sparrers' nists as ye 
 likes, young gen'lemen," said the farmer; "the 
 little warmin!" 
 
 (He meant the sparrows, not us.) 
 
 There were long wreaths of blown sparrows' 
 eggs dangling and crossing in the farm kitchen, 
 and the farmer belonged to a club that paid so 
 much a dozen for sparrows' heads. He had lived 
 amongst birds all his life, and yet he did not know 
 what good the sparrows did his garden, and his 
 orchard, and his farm-crops. If he had known, 
 he would have called us "little warmin," when 
 he saw us pulling out the hay the little brown-
 
 SULKY SAM. 31 
 
 coats had twisted into homes. Perhaps the 
 Doctor would have stopped us if he had seen 
 us; but he was telling some of the big fellows 
 the history of the Tower, showing them that the 
 barn had once been the banqueting-chamber of 
 the old Hall, and a root-house, with a great fire- 
 place in each corner, the kitchen; and pointing 
 out that the facings and the ornamental copings 
 were not stone, but moulded brick-earth stone 
 being scarce in that clayey country. Some of 
 the smacks that we could just see from the top 
 of the Tower, he said, were dredging for stone. 
 A few of us little chaps liked to hear about all 
 that ; but most of us, I suppose, were a great 
 deal more interested in the birds' nests. 
 
 If we were doing mischief, however, we didn't 
 know it ; and I don't think that Bear's Cub was 
 any better employed, sitting sulking on the wall 
 of the well. The good-natured farmer's wife 
 brought him out a great hunk of bread and 
 cheese, but he wouldn't eat it; and when she
 
 32 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 asked him why he didn't go with the rest, he 
 said that we were "a set of beasts ;" so she left 
 him to sit and sulk. 
 
 There he sat sulking when we tramped away 
 from the farm. When the last of us turned the 
 corner of the long, high-hedged chase, we could 
 just see him crawling out of the gate of the straw- 
 yard like a sulky snail. 
 
 It came on to rain before we got home, and 
 we had to go at the double; but Bear's Cub 
 wouldn't hurry. He came back drenched, and 
 was laid up with a bad cold ; but he didn't get 
 much pity from anybody, because he had brought 
 it 01 himself by his sulkiness.
 
 III. 
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 
 
 ONE of the nicest fellows at Axleford was 
 dashing George Rippingale. I was not 
 at school long with him, because he was ever so 
 much older than I ; but long after he had left 
 school we used to talk about him. He was a 
 tall, dark, handsome, clever, plucky fellow, and 
 so we were proud of him. But we were very 
 fond of him too especially the youngsters. He 
 wouldn't let us be put upon if he could help 
 it ; and he was a very generous chap too, and he 
 used to show us how to do our exercises, and 
 things like that. When he had left school, and 
 any of the big fellows was afraid to do anything,
 
 34 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 we used to say, " Ah ! Rippingale would have 
 done it;" and we little fellows who had been at 
 school with him used to cock over the little fel- 
 lows who hadn't, as if knowing him somehow 
 made us finer fellows ourselves. He went to 
 Addiscombe when he left school, and he was 
 killed at Aliwal. Poor old Rip ! I could tell you 
 dozens of dashing things he did, but I have only 
 room for two stories. 
 
 On the road to Dulchester there was a farm 
 called Little Rowlands, and such a queer old 
 farmer lived there. All the time I was at school 
 he wore the same clothes, week-days and Sun- 
 days ; hat, and boots, and everything looked as 
 if they had been taken off a scarecrow. Indeed, 
 some of the scarecrows about Axleford were 
 better dressed than old Lufkin. And yet he 
 was one of the richest men in all Calfingham- 
 shire. He touched his dusty broad-brimmed hat 
 to the banker when he met him in Dulchester 
 High Street on market-days; but when old
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 35 
 
 Lufkin went into the bank, the banker used to 
 ask him into the bank parlour; and when he left, 
 the banker used to come out to the front door 
 with him, and stand talking with him on the 
 steps. Besides the heaps of money he had in 
 the bank, it was said that old Lufkin kept a lot 
 at home, hidden in all kinds of queer places, 
 for fear the bank should break. I don't know 
 whether this was true ; but, at any rate, he never 
 asked any one to his house, and he tried to keep 
 every one except his men off his farm. He 
 kept three or four fierce dogs, and he always had 
 a great surly beast of a bull. He was obliged to 
 kill one or two, because they gored I don't know 
 how many people ; but when he got rid of one 
 big brute, he always bought a bigger. The one 
 I am going to tell you about was the biggest 
 and surliest of them all a great brindled brute, 
 with frizzled brown curls, that looked as if they 
 had been singed, between his sharp horns, and 
 eyes like hot coals. His bellow was very much 
 
 3 2
 
 36 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 like a lion's roar, and he lashed his sides with 
 his tufted tail just like a lion. When old Bel- 
 zebull that was the name we gave the beast 
 was in any of the meadows near the road, and 
 looked over the hedge, or the stile, or the gate at 
 us blowing out his breath as if he was smoking 
 through his nose we little chaps used to feel 
 funky. We should have been afraid to go into the 
 same field with, him, as Rippingale did, though 
 we were all head-over-ears in love with the pretty 
 little girl whom Rippingale went to save. She 
 was the Doctor's niece, and had just come on a 
 visit to the school-house. She had gone out for 
 a walk by herself, and climbed over into one of 
 old Lufkin's pastures to gather the white lace- 
 like hemlock that was growing in the ditches. 
 Belzebull was in the next meadow, and when he 
 saw her red cloak in the middle of the milky 
 blossoms, he gave a growl and made a rush at her 
 (the gate of his meadow was open). Rippingale 
 was coming back from Dulchester, and heard her
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 37 
 
 scream. When he looked over the stile, pretty 
 little Annie Scott was running away on the far- 
 ther side of the pasture, with the bull after her. 
 In a second Rippingale had vaulted over the 
 stile, and in half a minute more he had pulled 
 up a hedge-stake, and was tearing across the pas- 
 ture. He only got across it just in time. Annie 
 was standing with her back against a tree, and 
 the bull had shut his eyes to make his run at her. 
 Just as the bull dashed in, Rippingale dashed in 
 too, gave him a tremendous clout across the nose 
 with his stick, caught up Annie in his other arm, 
 and got as far off with her as he could before the 
 bull had time to turn. Belzebull was in a tre- 
 mendous rage when he found he had missed his 
 aim and only furrowed up the bark. He stamped 
 with his fore-feet and bellowed, and drew back 
 as if he meant to give the tree another charge ; 
 but in a second he was after Rippingale and 
 Annie. Rippingale had to turn then, and back 
 and dodge as if he was playing at chevy, and go
 
 38 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 through the broadside exercise with his big stick. 
 At last, however, he managed to reach the stile, 
 and drop Annie over it into the road ; but, as he 
 turned to do so, the bull got at him, and tossed 
 him up into the trees. Fortunately he was stand- 
 ing sideways, and so the bull only caught him be- 
 tween the horns. But when he came down again 
 he fell flat, face downwards ; and the second time 
 Belzebull played battledore and shuttlecock with 
 him, one of the sharp horns would have run right 
 through Rippingale's ribs, if it had not happened 
 to strike against his knife in his waistcoat-pocket. 
 This time, however, Rippingale managed to catch 
 hold of the branches ; and then he crawled along 
 them, and dropped down alongside poor scared 
 little Annie from the ends of the other branches 
 that overhung the road. Just didn't we young- 
 sters wish that we had been able to do dashing 
 things like that, when we saw how fond she was 
 of Rip ? 
 
 And now for my other story :
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 39 
 
 The leaky old punt in the school-pond was not 
 the only boat we could get. The Axleford miller 
 kept three or four, which we used to hire some- 
 times on holidays. His was a water-mill, about 
 a quarter of a mile from the village. Well, one 
 Saturday after dinner, Rippingale said, "Now, 
 then, youngsters, who wants a row ? I '11 stand the 
 boat, and you must pull me, you know. Quis ?" 
 Lots of us shouted "Ego!" and I was one of the 
 six he picked out. It was a very hot afternoon, 
 and when we got down to it, the dusty, mossy old 
 mill looked as if it would nod itself into the river 
 if it did not take care. " The-bigger-rogue-the- 
 better-luck, the bigger-rogue-the-better-luck," it 
 was muttering drowsily, just as if it was talking 
 in its sleep. The miller and his man were both 
 snoring, with their legs spread out on the floury 
 floor, and their backs resting against fat sacks, 
 and you couldn't help fancying that if they didn't 
 soon wake, the stones would think they had a 
 right to have a rest too, and the white meal
 
 40 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 would stop running out of the brown spouts. 
 The miller's wife let us into the little garden 
 that led down to the rotten steps, where the 
 boats were poking their heads together, as if they 
 were whispering secrets. 
 
 " You 'd better not go fur this afternoon, 
 Master Jarge," she said to Rippingale. " There 's 
 thunder in the air." 
 
 He was a favourite with the miller's wife, just 
 as he was with almost everybody else. He chose 
 a four-oared boat, and off we went in a splash- 
 ing spurt at first. 
 
 "Talk about cuttersmen!" we said, and we 
 caught crabs, and one of the tholes broke, and a 
 fellow tumbled back with his legs up in the air. 
 But that kind of thing, and laughing at it, was 
 too hot work to keep up long. There was a tiny 
 breeze now and then on the river, though even 
 the quaker-grass scarcely moved in the meadows, 
 and the wet weeds smelt cool, and the willow- 
 leaves looked cool as they dipped into the water;
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 
 
 but everything else was awfully hot. Everything 
 was very still too. When a fish leapt, it made 
 you jump. It was not long before we could see 
 the thunder-clouds working up from the sea, but 
 Rippingale thought that the storm would not 
 break for a good while ; and so on and on we 
 went a good deal farther than we thought we 
 were going, though we did only "spoon the 
 batter." The river was a very little one so 
 narrow in some places that the oars had nothing 
 but reeds and rushes to dip into, and sometimes 
 we had to unship them to keep them from striking 
 against the banks ; and so shallow in some places 
 that we had to take off our shoes and stockings, 
 and tuck up our trousers, and push the boat over 
 the shoals. The water felt so refreshing that 
 Rippingale proposed a bathe. We did not think 
 anything of the storm whilst we were splashing 
 about in the water, and chasing one another 
 naked, like savages, along the banks ; but when 
 we were putting on our clothes, darkness suddenly
 
 42 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 seemed dropped into the air like ink into water : 
 not a leaf moved, and we seemed to be breathing 
 out of a lime-kiln. Then there came a little puff 
 of wind, and then the sky was cracked right down 
 to the ground with a broad jagged flash of blue 
 and pink lightning, and then the thunder thumped 
 and rattled and rumbled as if the heavens had 
 given way and all the stars were tumbling in ; 
 and then down came the rain in one thick square 
 mass that drenched us to the skin and half filled 
 the boat before we had time even to look for 
 shelter. Some of us felt scared, but Rippingale 
 said, 
 
 " Keep your pluck up. It was my fault ; 
 but there 's no great harm done. We won't go 
 under the trees the Doctor says they attract 
 the lightning. Keep close together behind me, 
 and we '11 creep under the hedges to that farm- 
 house yonder." 
 
 So after him we trotted. Sometimes we kept 
 under the hedges, and sometimes we made a cut
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 43 
 
 across a narrow field. The rain made some of it 
 rather heavy country ; but when we got blown, 
 Rippingale would take us in tow, or give us a 
 ride pick-a-back. The rain ceased when we got 
 within about a mile of the farm, but the light- 
 ning still flashed and the thunder still rolled. 
 Presently there came a flash that made us put 
 our hands up to our eyes, and directly after it 
 a clap that seemed to shake the ground. 
 
 " I 'm sure that was a thunderbolt," said Rip- 
 pingale, whilst the clap was changing into a sullen 
 growl. " I wonder what 's struck ? " 
 
 When we looked up, smoke was rolling up 
 from the thatch of the big barn at the farm. 
 
 "Come along, boys !" shouted Rippingale, and 
 off he started at a gallop. By the time we got 
 to the farm the barn was in a blaze, and the fire 
 was spreading to the other farm-buildings and 
 the ricks, and making spiteful licks at the roof 
 of the farmhouse. 
 
 " Now then, boys, do something or other pull
 
 44 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 out those pigs, if you can't do anything else," 
 said Rippingale. 
 
 According we pulled down tarry planks and 
 prickly furze, and lugged out squealing pigs 
 by the legs, and the ears, and the tail, fancy- 
 ing ourselves little heroes, though there was 
 not the, slightest danger now, as the storm was 
 over. Danger for us youngsters, that is : Rippin- 
 gale ran into plenty of danger, and behaved like 
 a real hero. The farmer and his men, and people 
 from the neighbouring farms and the nearest 
 village, and two rural policemen, were rushing 
 about knocking their heads together as if that 
 by itself would do any good. A boy had gone 
 off at full gallop for the engine, and till that 
 came the bewildered people seemed to think 
 they could most profitably employ their time in 
 getting in one another's way. The farmer's wife 
 and her servants were pitching basins and look- 
 ing-glasses out of bed-room windows. One man, 
 more sensible than the rest, was trying to get
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 45 
 
 the horses out of the stable ; but they would not 
 face the fire in the yard, and laid down their 
 ears, and lashed out with their heels, and bit, 
 and literally screamed in frantic fear. 
 
 "You should blindfold them," cried Rippingale; 
 and he ran into the stable, not caring a fig for their 
 bare yellow teeth and heavy hoofs, and slipped 
 corn-sacks over their heads, and then he and the 
 man led them out in pairs. As the last pair 
 clumped out of the stable, its thatch caught. 
 Meantime buckets had been got out, but the 
 people didn't seem to know what to do with 
 them. 
 
 " Why, make a chain down to the horse-pond 
 there," cried Rippingale ; and he hustled the 
 sleepy men, and women, and children, and us 
 youngsters, about until he had got two lines, one 
 to send up the full buckets, and the other to pass 
 back the empties. When the other farmers' men 
 who were not in the bucket chain had got some 
 one to tell them what to do, they were brave
 
 46 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 enough in climbing up to all kinds of dangerous 
 places to pitch the water from, but Rippingale 
 was just as brave with his bucket. The buckets, 
 though, couldn't do much good without an engine, 
 however bravely the water was pitched out of 
 them. The fire was fiercer than ever, when up 
 rattled the little red County Insurance engine be- 
 hind four horses, almost swinging over, although 
 it was heavily ballasted with sitting and standing 
 smock-frocks. Beside the engine a police inspec- 
 tor was galloping as if for a wager. 
 
 " Who 's that ? " he said, as he jumped off his 
 horse. " He 's a cool young customer." 
 
 We youngsters, who overheard him, felt very 
 proud that, busy as he was, the great man 
 should have had his attention attracted to our 
 dashing George. Rippingale was then walk- 
 ing along a black blistered beam toe and heel, 
 as calmly as if he was only measuring a hop- 
 skip-and-jump, to get a good place to pitch his 
 bucketful from. When the engine was got to
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 47 
 
 work, Rippingale sometimes pumped away at 
 that, and sometimes he helped in sending up the 
 full buckets (he made us keep on the " empties " 
 side). 
 
 The fire was got under in the yard at last, 
 but by that time the house had caught. It had 
 caught and been put out ever so many times, but 
 now it flared up like a great bonfire. The roof 
 was thatch, and there was almost as much timber 
 as brick in the walls. Only one window in the 
 upper storey was free from flames, and out of that 
 there came a horrid shriek. The farmer's wife 
 shrieked as horribly when she heard it. 
 
 " It 's little Peter!" she howled. " Ye towd me, 
 Jane, you took him down to the cottage hours 
 ago." 
 
 Little Peter was the farmer's wife's lame sickly 
 little boy. He was asleep in his cot when the 
 fire broke out, and had been left to sleep. As 
 soon as the house was seriously threatened, the 
 flustered mistress had bidden her flustered maid
 
 48 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 carry him out of harm's way; but the fire had 
 made her lose her head, and she had forgotten 
 to see that Jane did as she was bid. Now the 
 poor woman could do nothing but shriek, and 
 wring her hands, and make mad rushes at the 
 house. If she had not been held back, she would 
 have dashed up the blazing staircase. The farmer 
 was on the other side of the house, and the other 
 men looked scared when they saw the flames 
 rushing up in two broad twisted horns, close to 
 the window of the room in which poor lame 
 little Peter was shrieking. 
 
 But Rippingale was not scared. There was a 
 plank in front of the house, and he put it up 
 against the window, and ran up it like a rope- 
 dancer, and smashed in the leaden lattice with 
 its diamond panes, when he could not squeeze 
 through the open part out of which little Peter's 
 screams kept coming. The plank tumbled just 
 as he got in, and for a minute the flames joined 
 across the window. We thought we should never
 
 DASHING GEORGE. 49 
 
 see our dashing George again ; but out through 
 the smoke came something with a flop, and Rip 
 was lying on his back in the courtyard, as black 
 as a collier, and with one arm broken, but not 
 hurt otherwise ; and little Peter was lying on him, 
 panting for breath, but with only his night-gown 
 singed. Oh, what a fuss everybody made with 
 Rippingale, though the house was still burning ! 
 The inspector put down Rip's name in his report 
 of the fire, as the one who had " rendered the 
 most efficient assistance," and Rippingale had 
 a long paragraph all to himself in the Calfing- 
 ham Standard, headed " Juvenile Gallantry," and 
 ending, "We understand that this noble young 
 gentleman is to enter the Indian service. We 
 predict for him a Wellingtonian career." 
 
 Poor Rip did not live long enough to be made 
 a duke ; but the farmer and his wife were very 
 much disappointed and disgusted to learn that he 
 had not been made, at the very least, a colonel 
 the day after he left Axleford. 
 
 4
 
 IV. 
 
 SHY DICK. 
 
 THERE are three birds that ought not to 
 be put into an aviary : the blackbird, and 
 the robin, and the wren; the blackbird is too 
 fond of cocking over little birds, and the robin is 
 too fond of fighting, and the poor little wren is 
 too timid ever to be comfortable in a crowd. 
 Well, a school is a kind of aviary, and I have 
 sometimes thought that it would be a much nicer 
 kind of aviary if you could keep out of it the 
 bullies who are like the blackbirds, and the boys 
 who are always picking quarrels, and wanting to 
 " have it out," like the robins, and the poor little 
 scared chaps like the wrens. But, after all, all
 
 SHY DICK. 51 
 
 kinds of people must rub shoulders with all kinds 
 of people when they grow up, and, therefore, 
 perhaps it is just as well that they should have 
 to begin to rub shoulders when they are young. 
 The bullies get taken down ; the fighting boys 
 often find more than their match; the scared 
 little coddled boys, fresh from the nursemaid's 
 kisses, have their babyish peevishness shamed 
 out of them, and learn to pluck up a manlier 
 spirit of their own. 
 
 " Miss Jemima " the little fellow I have told 
 you about, with the long curls and the Italian- 
 ironed collars was one of the wrens when he 
 first came to Axleford, but he had quite grown 
 out of his wrennishness before the end of his 
 second half, as perhaps you will remember. And 
 yet he was always a gentler fellow in his ways 
 than most of us. Some fellows turn from timid 
 wrens into bullying blackbirds, but Shy Dick was 
 not like that. He was always a plucky fellow 
 
 at bottom, and really plucky fellows never are 
 
 4 2
 
 52 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 bullies. He was simply shy when he first came 
 to school, because, I suppose, he was born shy, 
 like the wrens (he used to blush all over his face 
 and neck, like a girl right up to the top of his 
 ears), and because he had never had any boys to 
 play with until he came to Axleford. 
 
 But we used to make cruel fun of poor little 
 Dick when he first came. We used to put his 
 hair in paper, and promise to buy him a smelling- 
 bottle on his birthday ; and make him blush like 
 a peony by telling him not to blush ; and a great 
 deal of brilliant wit of that kind. His first half, 
 and part of his second, must have been hard 
 times for poor little Dick. If a boy is shy, he 
 does not like to be thought spoony ; and that is 
 what we thought Miss Jemima, as you may guess 
 from the name we gave him. 
 
 It was in the autumn of his first year at school 
 that Shy Dick first came out showed us that 
 he wasn't a Miss Jemima. There was a fellow at 
 Axleford of the name of Close ; Titus was his
 
 SHY DICK. 53 
 
 other name, but he ought rather to have been 
 called Caligula, or something of that kind. He 
 was a big fellow, and, by taking care not to fight 
 with fellows that could have licked him, he had 
 got the reputation, somehow, of being a terrible 
 fellow if he did choose to fight. Not that all of 
 us believed in him. If he had been better tem- 
 pered, perhaps we might have done so; but he 
 was such a nasty bully, that it is strange that it 
 was left to Miss Jemima to show that he was a 
 great hulking coward. 
 
 This Titus Close had picked out a poor weak 
 little chap in Shy Dick's class to tyrannize over 
 especially. He did it on the sly, for, though 
 Rippingale had left school, the other big fellows 
 would soon have sent Mr. Titus to grass, and then 
 to Coventry, if they had found out that he was 
 up to games like that. Well, one day, after morn- 
 ing school, Shy Dick saw poor little Ted Siderfin 
 taking a bit of black "breeching" out of his 
 locker.
 
 54 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 "What's that?" said Dick. 
 
 " Mr. Close's warming-strap," said Ted ; " and 
 I must make haste, or he '11 lick me worse." And 
 then he burst out crying, and told Dick that 
 every day before dinner he had to carry down 
 the leathern thong to " the limes " (there was a 
 thick clump of them at the farthest end of the 
 paddock) to be welted with it by the tyrannical 
 Titus. 
 
 Shy Dick blushed up to the top of his ears 
 at the thought of becoming a public character ; 
 but the blood came from a brave little heart, and 
 he made up his mind that he would do his best 
 to save his class-fellow from any more of such 
 cruelty. 
 
 " I '11 go with you," said Dick, " and we '11 both 
 pitch into him. That 's fair with a great big 
 fellow like that. Mamma told me not to fight, 
 but I 'm sure she wouldn't mind, if she knew all 
 about it." 
 
 Ted Siderfin almost forgot the daily drubbing
 
 SHY DICK. 55 
 
 he had been expecting in his astonishment. Even 
 poor weakly little Ted following the fashion, 
 like other weak people had been in the habit 
 of poking fun at Miss Jemima. But now Shy 
 Dick puffed out his nostrils, and, though he shook 
 all over, it was through excitement, not funkiness. 
 He had to hurry Siderfin down to the limes. Ted 
 knew that he was likely to catch double through 
 being late ; but still he thought he was not likely 
 to better himself by taking a little chap like Shy 
 Dick with him, however brave Miss Jemima might 
 look and talk when the dread Titus was out of 
 sight. 
 
 When the little fellows had gone down the side 
 of the hollow in the paddock that hid them from 
 the other boys, they found Titus stamping like a 
 wild bull on the yellow leaves under the limes. 
 
 "Why didn't you come before, you young 
 beggar ? " he said, seizing Ted by the collar and 
 snatching the warming-strap ; " and what 's tftat 
 young beggar come for ? "
 
 56 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 But, as he spoke, there was a look in Shy Dick's 
 eyes that made Titus feel queer. However, he 
 gave Ted one cruel lash across the shoulders with 
 the thong. The leather had no sooner fallen than 
 Miss Jemima flew at him like a wild cat. Shy 
 Dick didn't know anything about fighting, and, 
 trusting to the light of Nature, I am afraid that 
 he scratched as if he had been a real Miss Jemima, 
 as well as cuffed and kicked most lustily. Any- 
 how, he bunged up the eyes of the dread Titus, 
 gave him a bloody nose, and got him down upon 
 his back. Shy Dick got a black eye and a bloody 
 nose himself, but, though the blood spurted all 
 over his Italian-ironed collar, he " spoony Miss 
 Jemima" five minutes before did not care a 
 straw for such inconveniences. He rather looked 
 upon them as a soldier looks upon his medals. 
 He had fought against odds in a good cause, and 
 had conquered. He had suddenly become a little 
 man. If Titus Close had not been an awful 
 coward, of course Miss Jemima could not have
 
 SHY DICK. 57 
 
 licked him like that; but Titus Close was an 
 awful coward. When Miss Jemima flew at him 
 showing by the way he went in that he knew 
 nothing about boxing instead of brushing off 
 the little fellow as contemptuously as a lion 
 whisks off a fly, or laughing at his little fists as 
 a mother laughs when her baby beats her, Titus 
 grew sick and cold, and in a few minutes was 
 lying on his back, rubbing his shins, and looking 
 a very miserable object. He was very proud of 
 his good looks the servants and the needle- 
 woman thought him a handsome fellow ; but his 
 rosy cheeks were scratched, and his black eyes 
 were made black, or were soon to become so, in 
 another sense, and his Roman nose was staining 
 the worked shirt-front he was so cocky over. 
 Moreover, great tall Titus Close was lying on 
 the yellow leaves, actually whimpering ; and it 
 was little Shy Dick Ford the scoffed-at Miss 
 Jemima who had floored him and made him 
 blubber. Ted Siderfin took no part in the fight,
 
 58 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 though it was fought on his behalf; but when he 
 found that his brutal despot was really down, 
 powerless, he wanted to kick him. But Shy Dick 
 would not suffer that. 
 
 " No, Ted," he said, " if you wanted to do that, 
 you should have pitched into him when he was 
 able to hit back again." 
 
 A mighty deal we all made of Miss Jemima 
 after this. The big fellows taught him " science," 
 as an improvement on his rough-and-tumble, 
 and yet womanish, style of fighting. (Even his 
 warmest admirers were forced to apologize for 
 the scratching). The little fellows especially 
 little Ted Siderfm thought almost as much of 
 him as they did of Hercules, or any of those 
 fighting-men they were so fond of reading about 
 in Lempriere, when they ought to have been 
 learning their Propria qu& maribus, or getting 
 up their Delectus. 
 
 If Dick had not been a very good sort of little 
 fellow, he would have been spoilt by the notice
 
 SHY DICK. 59 
 
 he got. Axleford must have seemed a. very 
 different place to him from what it had seemed 
 say, at our last breaking-up ball. We always had 
 a breaking-up ball at the end of each half. The 
 sisters and cousins of the fellows who lived in 
 Dulchester and round about there used to be 
 invited, and we had what we called punch a 
 mild infusion of lemon-pips, as I remember it 
 now, with just a hint now and then that it was 
 spirit-haunted and altogether the affair was 
 very jolly. We knew the girls, because we had 
 the same dancing-master, and once or twice 
 every half he used to brigade us together, for a 
 kind of field-day, in the Cups Assembly Room 
 at Dulchester. He was a queer, clever little 
 fellow. His name was Thorne, but it ought to 
 have been Rosebud, he was such a soft, smiling 
 little chap. Sometimes, however, even he could 
 not help getting out of patience with us, when 
 we wouldn't pay any attention to his taps on the 
 back of his little kit, or his "one-two-three-four."
 
 60 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 But it was his violin pupils that troubled him 
 most. One of them, I remember, always made a 
 bungle of his " stopping," and was making such 
 a terrible bungle of it one day, that poor little 
 Mr. Thorne threw down his fiddle, pushed his 
 fingers into his ears, and cried out in agony, 
 
 " My dear sir, it is wicked to behave so ! what 
 was your little finger made for?" 
 
 But I was talking about Shy Dick's first 
 breaking-up ball at Axleford. Though we did 
 laugh at him, he made us jealous, because the 
 girls looked at him so. He was a very good- 
 looking little chap, and he looked uncommonly 
 good-looking that night, spruced up with his 
 long curls and Italian-ironed collar. The girls, 
 however, soon began to sneer at Shy Dick, when 
 he stuck close to the wall, without saying a word 
 to any of them, and blushing all over when they 
 whisked by him. So we put up little Mary Rus- 
 sell to " take a rise " out of Shy Dick. She was 
 a black-eyed, roguish little puss, game for any
 
 P.6i
 
 SHY DICK. 6 1 
 
 kind of fun. She went up to Dick, and put her 
 hand upon her heart, and made him a profound 
 bow, and said, "Beautiful Miss Jemima, may I 
 have the honour of waltzing with you ? " And 
 then she caught him round the waist, and whirled 
 him round the room, whilst poor Dick looked 
 ready to cry from shame, and we were all almost 
 crying with laughing.
 
 V. 
 
 LAZY TOM. 
 
 THERE is a proverb about a dog that was so 
 lazy that it used to lean against the wall 
 to bark. Well, really, I do believe that if Tom 
 Pine had been a dog he would have been lazier 
 than that: he would have leaned against the 
 wall without barking. He was a great tall fellow, 
 and we called him Ingens Finns. Agitatur ventis, 
 you know, is the rest of the sentence in the De- 
 lectus, but Tom Pine was never agitated by any- 
 thing. The little chaps used to do pretty nearly 
 what they liked with him, because they knew he 
 wouldn't whop them, whatever they did. Good 
 nature had something to do with this, but lazi-
 
 LAZY TOM. 63 
 
 ness had more. Tom was not a stupid fellow, 
 and could say funny things sometimes when he 
 chose to take the trouble ; but both in and out 
 of school he was most abominably lazy. Big as 
 he was, he was only in Eutropius, and got taken 
 down by little fellows that could almost have run 
 between his legs without ducking. Tom didn't 
 care. I think, indeed, that he liked to get to 
 the bottom of the class, because there he could 
 lounge against the wall and rest his book and 
 his elbow on the window-seat Sometimes, how- 
 ever, he answered right by chance, and was 
 obliged to go up a place or two ; but he soon 
 dropped down again, and looked quite relieved 
 when he got back to his old corner. Tom was 
 pretty big when he first came to Axleford, and 
 had been put into a big fellows' class; but he 
 soon came dropping down from one lower class 
 to another. He was a funny fellow sometimes, 
 as I have said, and he used to say that he knew 
 he couldn't get to be top-boy of the school, and so
 
 64 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 he meant to be bottom-boy before he had finished 
 that that was far easier, and more out of the 
 common. At first the Doctor lectured him, and 
 when the lectures did him no good, the Doctor 
 licked him. But lectures and lickings were all the 
 same to Lazy Tom. In a lazy kind of way he 
 rather liked the Doctor for taking so much trouble 
 about him, and never bore any malice against 
 him, however hard he might hit and the Doctor 
 could hit precious hard (though he was such a 
 nice fellow) when his lips turned white because 
 he thought a chap was obstinately defying him 
 but the lickings could not drive the laziness 
 out of Ingens Pinus, any more than the lectures. 
 Then the Doctor thought of expelling Tom be- 
 cause of the bad example he set ; but Tom was 
 so good-natured that the Doctor couldn't make 
 up his mind to do so especially since, after all, 
 Tom did very little harm, for the boys roasted 
 him even more than the masters did. So Tom 
 dropped down into the care of the under-masters,
 
 LAZY TOM. 65 
 
 and they reported him, and kept him in, and 
 gave him impositions, and made fun of him ; but 
 no good came of it. He had stood the Doctor's 
 satire, and so he was not likely to mind theirs 
 much. He took his canings so good-naturedly 
 that the Doctor got tired of caning him, and 
 the ushers of reporting him. When he got an 
 imposition, he simply said that it was an impo- 
 sition ; and, as for being kept in, that was no pun- 
 ishment, since his favourite employment during 
 play-hours was snoring on one of the school-room 
 forms. On hot afternoons he always went to 
 sleep in school-time also, with his head inside his 
 locker ; and when he was roused up by having 
 his ears pulled, or a cut of the cane across his 
 shoulders, he used to yawn, and rub his eyes, and 
 stretch his long arms, in such a comically cool 
 fashion, that we were ready to die with laughing, 
 and the masters could not help laughing either. 
 And then, as soon as he got the chance, off he 
 would drop again. On hot afternoons, especially
 
 66 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 when we had suet-pudding at dinner, Tom Pine 
 was always going to sleep like fat Joe in " Pick- 
 wick." Tom's way of doing his sums made us 
 laugh too. He used to put down all the figures 
 from I to o, until he came to the right one. 
 Although he had dropped to the Eutropius class, 
 he had heard the Doctor talking about " conjec- 
 tural emendations" to the Horace class, and 
 those Tom called his conjectural emendations. 
 
 Tom was such a good-natured, comical fellow, 
 that if he had not been lazy out of school as well, 
 perhaps he might have made some of us follow 
 his lazy example in school ; but it was impossible 
 to take a fellow who scarcely ever did anything 
 briskly for a model. When Tom did play, he did 
 it so drowsily, and so soon gave up, -that, when 
 sides were chosen, he was generally left almost 
 to the last. He could give tremendous drives at 
 cricket, if he did get at the ball ; but then he 
 was sure to be run out. He had the coolness to 
 propose that he should have a fellow to run for
 
 LAZY TOM. 67 
 
 his hits. He never cared to bowl, and he was 
 not a mite of use in fielding. He put his hands 
 on his knees very scientifically, and there he kept 
 them. His favourite out-door "exercise" was 
 going adrift on the pond in the old punt. He 
 used to lie down on his back, pull his hat over his 
 eyes, and let the leaky old tub blunder about as it 
 pleased, sometimes stern foremost, and generally 
 broadside on. 
 
 The drill-sergeant tried hard to smarten Tom 
 up, but it was no good. " You Ve the makins of 
 a man in you, No. 9," the old fellow used to say; 
 "and it's a disgrace to your Queen and your 
 country that you should be sich a lout." Quite 
 little fellows could make their sword-sticks rattle 
 all about big Tom, without getting a single hit 
 back. When we went through the extension 
 motions, the sergeant ordered Tom to the front, 
 and jerked his arms out for him as if he had 
 been a semaphore. That was the only way to 
 
 make Tom go through them. When we went at 
 
 5 2
 
 68 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 the double, Tom got his heels nicely trodden on; 
 and when the sergeant growled out "counter- 
 mar-r-ch!" instead of turning, Tom used to go 
 on mooning all by himself right ahead. He was 
 ready enough to stop when the sergeant told us 
 to " mark time," but then he never lifted his feet. 
 " Stand at ease " was the only order he really 
 obeyed. Lazy Tom was a sore trial to Sergeant 
 Joyce. The sergeant looked upon perfect drill 
 as the whole duty of man. He was very fond of 
 boasting that he had seen " hactif service in the 
 Penins'lur ; " but since that service consisted 
 merely in having been disembarked at some 
 Spanish town at the beginning of a fortnight, and 
 re-embarked at it, without having fired a shot, at 
 the end of the fortnight, and he had never since 
 had an opportunity of distinguishing himself on 
 the tented field, the sergeant's military career did 
 not furnish much material for interesting stories. 
 Not being able to tell us these, he tried to keep up 
 our respect for his military character by playing
 
 LAZY TOM. 69 
 
 the martinet. He wore a military stock, although 
 the rest of his attire was mufti, and his fingers 
 used to itch to lay his cane across Tom Pine's 
 shoulders. The sergeant had so often reported 
 Tom, that, like the ushers, he had grown tired 
 of doing so. Indeed, the sergeant had not a 
 very great respect for the Doctor. Now and 
 then he had a bout with the sergeant with the 
 basket-hilted sticks, but the Doctor was not *. 
 scientific swordsman. All that he cared about 
 was to hit as hard and as often as he could no 
 matter what cuts and thrusts he laid himself 
 open to. He despised guards and parries, and 
 banged away like an Irishman with his shillelagh. 
 This dashing style of fencing made the Doctor 
 seem the better man in our eyes ; and the con- 
 sciousness of this made the tremendous whacks 
 which the sergeant got across the arms and the 
 calves of the legs hurt all the more the seeming 
 victory was obtained by such shamefully illegiti- 
 mate means. " Sir, s-s-s-sir," the poor wincing,
 
 70 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 indignant sergeant used to stutter, " if we had 
 been f-f-ightin' with st-ste-steel, I should have 
 k-k-killed you a d-d-dozen times in f-f-five mi- 
 nutes." To such an authority as the Doctor, 
 therefore, the sergeant was very unwilling to 
 appeal ; he knew that he would have to counter- 
 march himself at the double from Axleford, if 
 he laid his cane across our shoulders ; and so 
 Ingens Pinus cast a dark shadow on Sergeant 
 Joyce's life at least the four hours a week of it 
 he spent at Axleford. 
 
 Just one thing more to show you what a lazy 
 fellow Tom was. There was a great garden at 
 Axleford, and once or twice during the fruit 
 season we were turned into it to pick and pull 
 ad libitum. (Perhaps we sometimes did the same 
 without leave, but I won't tell tales out of school 
 of that kind.) Well, one day, when we were all 
 in the garden, I saw Lazy Tom lying on his back 
 in his shirt-sleeves, with his hands locked under 
 his head. He had laid himself down under a
 
 LAZY TOM. 71 
 
 gooseberry-bush, and he was eating the goose- 
 berries that drooped right into his mouth. 
 
 Yet even Lazy Tom could exert himself under 
 the stimulus of abnormal motives. He had a 
 grandmother who was very fond of him (and who 
 sadly encouraged his laziness letting him have 
 his breakfast in bed when he spent his holidays 
 with her, and excusing his lolling-about languor 
 when he did get up, on the ground that the poor 
 boy though he looked so much like her own 
 fine boy had inherited his puny, lack-a-daisical 
 mother's constitution Tom really was as strong 
 as a young cart-horse) ; and this old lady had a 
 black cat, with a brass collar, which, next to 
 Tom, she loved. Old women, therefore, and cats 
 especially if they were black, and more espe- 
 cially if they wore brass collars always found a 
 champion, even in Lazy Tom. It is not often 
 that they find champions amongst schoolboys 
 (who, I am afraid, are frequently not quite so 
 chivalrous as they make themselves out to have
 
 72 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 been when they grow up and write books about 
 themselves), and, therefore, as I have not much 
 good to say of Tom Pine, I am glad to be able 
 to say this of him. 
 
 You remember the ruined old church with 
 the ivy on it, close to Axleford School ? Well, 
 one day when we were poking about in the 
 ruins, looking for birds' nests, and pulling up the 
 grass to get grubs and earthworms for bait, we 
 found a young black cat, not much bigger than 
 a kitten, wandering about there; and, I am 
 ashamed to say, a good many of us began to 
 take cockshies at it with anything we could lay 
 hold of. The poor scared little thing ran up the 
 hairy ivy-stems, and jumped from one heap of 
 rough brick and mortar to another, slipping and 
 almost tumbling to the ground every now and 
 then, while sticks, and stones, and bits of slate 
 and tile flew round it like hail. At last it ma- 
 naged to scramble on to a corner of the tower, 
 where there was hardly room enough for it to
 
 LAZY TOM. 
 
 73 
 
 stand ; but there it stood mewing most piteously, 
 and wondering how it was ever to get down again. 
 
 Whilst we again I am ashamed to say were 
 enjoying its perplexity, Lazy Tom lounged up 
 with his hands in his pockets. They soon came 
 out of his pockets when he saw what we were at. 
 He didn't say anything, but he flung out his long 
 arms right and left like flails, and went through 
 the fellows big and little, as the police go through 
 the crowd on Lord Mayor's Day. Then up the 
 tower he climbed, and though the young cat 
 spat and scratched, he managed to lay hold of 
 it, and to bring it down safe in his shirt-bosom. 
 What is more, he took the trouble to find out 
 where it lived, and to carry it home. 
 
 Another time he had gone down into the vil- 
 lage to buy " parliament." (Tom was very fond 
 of parliament, and used to lie on his back munch- 
 ing it until he gave himself quite a thick yellow 
 moustache and imperial but he gave a good 
 deal of it away too.) Well, Tom was just coming
 
 74 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 out of the shop with his precious parcel of flat 
 gingerbread, when he saw a pack of the village 
 boys, some of them bigger than himself, mobbing 
 a poor bent old woman who went by the name 
 of the Axleford Witch. The young scamps were 
 flinging dung at her, and trying to hustle her 
 into a slimy pond. Grown-up people were look- 
 ing on ; some of them grinning, and none of 
 them interfering. But as soon as Tom saw what 
 was up, down went the parliament, smashing into 
 little bits ; and in two minutes half a dozen of 
 the young louts were splashing in the pond (comi- 
 cal figures they looked when they floundered out 
 half-smothered in mud and duckweed), and Tom 
 was squiring -the lonely old woman home to her 
 hovel as carefully as if she had been his grand- 
 mother. 
 
 I don't say that, generally speaking, Lazy Tom 
 was a " respectable character," but there is some- 
 thing to respect in almost everybody's character 
 if you will only take the trouble to look for it ;
 
 LAZY TOM. 75 
 
 and now, at any rate, I do thoroughly respect 
 Lazy Tom for not having been ashamed to say 
 openly at school that he loved his grandmother, 
 and for always being ready to stand up for old 
 women and cats, because his grandmother was 
 an old woman, and had a cat that she was very 
 fond of.
 
 VI. 
 
 FUNNY PAT. 
 
 PAT was called Pat because his name was 
 Wix Wix M'Carthy. His father had 
 married an Englishwoman, a Miss Wix, and Pat 
 had been christened in honour of his mother's 
 family. But Wix seemed such a stupid name 
 for a funny little fellow that was half an Irish- 
 man ; and so we called him Pat. Pat was a 
 genuine little Irishman of the novel and play 
 type (in real life Irishmen are often dull and 
 peaceable enough) : he seemed to think that the 
 world was made to be funny and to fight in, or 
 rather always to be funny in; fighting, in his
 
 FUNNY PAT. 77 
 
 opinion, being one of the best bits of the fun. 
 But I am not going to write about his fights. 
 Fights between schoolboys, I know, sometimes 
 seem almost unavoidable, but I think now that 
 there were a good many loo many such fights in 
 my schooldays. (I thought so then, when I got 
 licked.) I don't know how things are now-a-days. 
 I have heard that they are much better, and have 
 read that, when an Eton boy was asked the rea- 
 son, he answered, " I suppose we funk each other." 
 I hope, however, that a better reason than that 
 " one 's afraid, an' t'other durstn't " answer could 
 be given. Perhaps instead of " funking," school- 
 boys respect one another more than they did, and 
 themselves to boot. After all, if you think of the 
 causes of schoolboys' fights, there is not, generally 
 speaking, much reason to crow over the giving or 
 getting of a black eye in them. And it is a very 
 great mistake to think that a schoolboy who gets 
 fame as a " bruiser " is necessarily a manly fellow. 
 Some such fellows turn out to be great " sheep,"
 
 78 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD 
 
 as the Australians say, when the great Battle of 
 Life has to be fought. 
 
 But you don't like " preaching " when you 
 want to hear a story ; and I don't like it either 
 when I am trying to tell one : so now for some 
 of Funny Pat's funny pranks. 
 
 There was a tra.p-door in the roof of the 
 school-house at Axleford. It was generally kept 
 padlocked, but now and then we found it open 
 when we slipped up to the garret-floor to recon- 
 noitre ; and, when we did find it open, we always 
 made a point of clambering through it on to the 
 roof. I suppose the chief charm of these clan- 
 destine expeditions was that they lucre clandes- 
 tine that we ran the risk of being kept in 
 through creeping out. Anyhow, we thought it 
 prime fun to get out upon the roof; and until a 
 fellow had scratched his name upon the leads, 
 he had not won his spurs in school opinion. The 
 leads were covered with names, and initials, and 
 caricatures, and epigrams, and sentimental verses
 
 FUNNY PAT. 79 
 
 to our sweethearts ; and besides our literary and 
 artistic contributions, every workman that had 
 been up to mend the roof seemed to have thought 
 it necessary to prick out the shape of his foot on 
 the leads, with his name running from heel to 
 toe, or a heart with his initials and his young 
 woman's grouped in the middle in a true-lover's 
 knot. The leads in themselves were worth climb- 
 ing up to see, and then there were I can't remem- 
 ber how many roof-ridges of mossy lichened tiles 
 to scramble over, and grass and wallflowers grew 
 on them ; and we could get sparrows' and star- 
 lings' and swallows' eggs, and sometimes young 
 sparrows and starlings and swallows, out of the 
 nests in the water-spouts, and the holes in the 
 walls and under the eaves ; and we could almost 
 look into the rooks' nests in the elms, that seemed 
 only a jump off the house ; and see the country 
 for miles round ; and scare the servants by sud- 
 denly making faces at them through the sky- 
 lights and tapping against garret-windows ; and
 
 So THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 shy little bits of mortar plump down upon the 
 tops of the ushers' hats, and watch them start 
 and look round puzzled, and then walk on again, 
 trying to make themselves believe it was all 
 fancy, until presently some more little bits came 
 rattling down, and the ushers got quite angry, 
 because they could not make out where they 
 came from. Finally, we could tear our clothes, 
 and scratch our hands and faces, and make our- 
 selves generally deliciously limy, and slimy, and 
 grimy on the roof. So what wonder we got out 
 at the trap-door whenever we found it open ? 
 
 Pat was very fond of roaming on the roof. He 
 could climb like a cat or a monkey, and prided 
 himself on knowing all its ins and outs better 
 than any other fellow. Well, one summer even- 
 ing the Doctor gave a party. The under-masters 
 and some of the big fellows were invited to it, 
 and the rest of us were left to amuse ourselves 
 as we pleased. Pat, and two or three of his 
 chums, stole up the garret stairs to the trap-door.
 
 FUNNY PAT. 8 1 
 
 In the gloom it seemed to be locked, but, when 
 Pat ran up the steps, he found that, though the 
 padlock was in the hasp, the key had been turned 
 in a hurry, and so the padlock was not fastened. 
 
 We were soon clambering over the tiles, and 
 presently we got into an argument about one of 
 the chimneys. There were all kinds of chimneys 
 high, narrow chimneys; low, broad chimneys ; 
 chimneys with pots, and chimneys with cowls ; 
 single chimneys, and wall-like stacks of chim- 
 neys, sticking up in all kinds of queer places in 
 the roof. This was a low chimney in the middle 
 of the house, with a gaping mouth like a little 
 well ; and Pat maintained that it was the chim- 
 ney of the Doctor's study, whilst the others 
 would have it that the chimney belonged to the 
 sick-room. 
 
 " Faith, I '11 go down and make ye see you 're 
 wrong with my own eyes," said Pat, who was 
 somewhat Irish also in his way of expressing 
 himself, and in a second he was lowering himself
 
 82 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 down the jagged shaft as a bear backs down a 
 hollow tree. 
 
 He got on pretty well for a yard or two, but 
 then a brick came out in his hand, and down 
 went poor Pat in a shower of sooty mortar. A 
 bend in the chimney brought him up before he 
 was much hurt ; and when we called down to 
 him, he shouted up to us to get him a rope. 
 
 We ran to the trap-door, but it was fast. One 
 of the servants, I suppose, had noticed how we 
 had left it, and not knowing any one was on the 
 roof, had locked us out. 
 
 " Oh, be hanged if you can't get a rope ! I 'd 
 get one somehow if I was up there ! What am 
 I to do at all, at all ? " grumbled Pat in comical 
 perplexity. "Sure, I must try to come up the 
 way I came down." 
 
 But facilis dcsccnsus Averni, you know: to 
 get up again hoc opus, hie labor est. Pat's foot 
 slipped. We could hear him shouting and slid- 
 ing down the incline that had first stopped him,
 
 FUNNY PAT. 83 
 
 in a rattling avalanche of loose lime and brick. 
 Then we heard a thud as if he had dropped ever 
 so many feet farther down ; and then we were 
 so scared that, not minding who heard us, we 
 scrambled to the side of the roof nearest the 
 playground, and shouted with might and main 
 for help. Before we could get any help from 
 that quarter, however, the tall Doctor came up 
 through the trap, like Banquo's ghost in Macbeth. 
 
 " This way, boys," he said, not half so crossly 
 as we expected ; and then he marched us down, 
 not by the back stairs we had come up, but by 
 the front stairs to the open drawing-room door. 
 
 "Walk in," he said, when we got there; and 
 in we huddled, feeling very sheepish in our dusty 
 clothes. 
 
 "These are the rest of the gang, ladies," said 
 the Doctor : " not very formidable burglars, are 
 they ? I think we needn't feel nervous any more." 
 
 And then everybody laughed, and we felt more 
 
 sheepish than ever. But saucy Pat, though he 
 
 6 2
 
 84 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD, 
 
 was twenty times the guy any of us was ragged, 
 and scratched, and bruised, and as black as a 
 sweep, as he stood in the midst of a muddle on 
 the hearthrug had the cheek to say, 
 
 " Sure, then, I did scare ye, sir ! " 
 
 And then there was another general laugh, 
 and the ladies said, 
 
 " Don't punish them, Doctor it 's so fortunate 
 the little fellow has not broken his neck." 
 
 Pat had inherited blarney as well as bulls, and 
 when he heard that, he made the ladies a very 
 polite bow and said, 
 
 " Faith, I 'd be glad to break it to get into 
 your company, ladies." 
 
 Then they all laughed again, and we were 
 ordered off to bed ; but that was all the punish- 
 ment we got. All of us had been wrong about 
 the chimney. It was the drawing-room chimney, 
 and when Pat fell the last time, he had tumbled 
 flop into the white-and-gold shavings in the old- 
 fashioned, wide drawing-room fireplace. The
 
 FUNNY PAT. 85 
 
 mysterious noises up the chimney that had been 
 heard before had caused some perturbation 
 amongst the Doctor's guests, and when black 
 Pat tumbled into the fire-shavings, all the women 
 had screamed, and all the men and boys had 
 made a rush to seize the supposed robber. When 
 the Doctor pulled Pat out, nobody knew him at 
 first. They all thought he was a burglar's Oliver 
 Twist ; but Pat had called out, 
 
 "I'm M'Carthy, sir I thought it was your 
 study, sir." 
 
 " And what did you want to do in my study ? " 
 asked the Doctor. 
 
 "Sure, I didn't expect to find ye in it, sir," 
 answered Pat ; and it being notorious that the 
 Doctor trusted to past labour for his lore, and 
 was not often in those days to be found in his 
 study, Pat's answer tallied so completely with 
 his name that the general laughter began which 
 got us off scot-free, and in which the Doctor 
 joined as heartily as anybody.
 
 86 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 Pat certainly was one of the cheekiest fellows 
 I ever knew. He was a very good mimic (ex- 
 cept that he could not quite get rid of his 
 brogue), and, when he "dressed up," his own 
 mother would scarcely have known him. He 
 was a free-handed little fellow, and so could 
 easily get clothes lent him by the servants and 
 the cottage boys and girls, and all kinds of tricks 
 he used to play in them. Once he made himself 
 up into a wooden-legged old pieman, and stumped 
 into the playground with a trayful of pastry. He 
 met one of the masters, and asked him very re- 
 spectfully whether " an ould man, as wanted to 
 arn a crust, might have lave to sell some shu- 
 parior poys to the young gintlemen ; " and when 
 the usher gave him leave, Pat gravely offered 
 him one of the "poys" as an acknowledgment 
 of his kindness, and then Pat took his stand at 
 the school-room door, and drove a roaring trade. 
 He would have cleared off his stock before we 
 had found him out if one of the fellows, who
 
 FUNNY PAT. 87 
 
 thought himself very 'cute, had not happened to 
 say, " I don't believe he is Irish : go and fetch 
 little Pat, he'll soon find out whether the old 
 chap is a ' counthryman ' of his." This was too 
 much for Pat. He shouted out in his natural 
 voice, " Faith, he is, Briggs ! " and then away he 
 hopped on his wooden leg, with Briggs after him. 
 It was not often, however, that Pat tried to 
 gammon us, because we got so up to him, after 
 a bit, that we used to suspect every tramp that 
 came near the school of being Pat. But on the 
 farmers' wives and daughters he was always 
 playing tricks. He was tall for his age, and 
 made quite a handsome gipsy-girl, when he had 
 parted his black hair in the middle, and stained 
 his face and hands with walnut-juice. His 
 roguish eyes were gipsy's ready-made, and with 
 a faded red cloak over his girl's clothes, and a 
 low-crowned straw hat on, or a chequered ker- 
 chief tied under his chin, Pat looked a first-rate 
 young fortune-teller. And then he knew enough
 
 88 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 of the people whose fortunes he told to make 
 them gape with astonishment. Outrageous for- 
 tunes he used to tell, and yet the silly people 
 more than half believed them at first. Mind, I 
 am not praising these pranks of Master Pat's, 
 and yet I can't help thinking that his fortune- 
 telling did some good. As drunkards have been 
 cured by soaking everything they ate in brandy, 
 so, perhaps, silly people may be cured by giving 
 them unlimited doses of folly. 
 
 The Squire at Axleford Hall was a rich old 
 bachelor a very nervous old gentleman, who 
 did not hunt, or shoot, or do anything but coddle 
 himself. He scarcely ever showed outside the 
 Hall on week-days, and on Sunday mornings he 
 slipped into his pew at church through a side 
 door as if he was afraid that he would shrivel up 
 like a jelly-fish if anybody looked at him. High 
 curtains hung all round the pew, and it was car- 
 peted and had chairs in it a faded carpet and 
 heavy old-fashioned chairs like those you can
 
 FUNNY PAT. 89 
 
 see at an old inn. It had a fireplace too, and 
 every Sunday morning no matter how hot it 
 might be the fire was lighted in it, and the 
 Squire sat close by the fire, in top-boots, and 
 a queer little grey pig-tail sticking out over 
 the collar of his spencer. We could see him 
 from the gallery, where we sat in the front seats 
 below the organ, but he made such a fuss if 
 he fancied that anybody had been looking at 
 him that we could only venture to peep between 
 our fingers. We did not like Squire Leake. He 
 seemed such a namby-pamby old noodle, and, 
 though he was never out himself, his bailiff was 
 always coming, " with the Squire's compliments," 
 to complain of our trespasses in the park. There 
 was somebody else who was always complaining 
 of our trespasses Miss Smith, a maiden lady, 
 who farmed about eighty acres of land, known 
 in the Squire's deeds and maps, and general par- 
 lance, as "Pork End." Miss Smith, I believe, 
 was a pretty good farmer, but she was not a very
 
 90 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 wise woman in other respects. She thought her- 
 self very " genteel," and tried hard to make her 
 neighbours call her farm " Broad Oaks ; " but they 
 wouldn't, because from time immemorial it had 
 been known in Axleford as Pork End. Though 
 she was so very "genteel." Miss Smith was very 
 superstitious, and Pat, dressed up in his gipsy 
 cloak, made her believe that the shy, grumpy 
 Squire was in love with her. Pat (mind again, I 
 say that I don't approve of such fibs) made her 
 believe also that the Squire wished to meet her 
 at six o'clock in the evening at a place to which 
 he or she (Pat) was appointed to guide her. Pat 
 meant to march Miss Smith right through the 
 village, and then let the Leake story leak out. 
 It was very unchivalrous, of course, in Pat to lay 
 such a plot, and very abominable in his chums to 
 chuckle at the thought of seeing it succeed ; but 
 then, really, Miss Smith had got us such a lot of 
 Phaedrus's Fables to learn by heart, by her fuss 
 about nothing, that we could not help thinking
 
 FUNNY PAT. 91 
 
 that she owed us some fun in return. Besides, 
 Pat had tried to " take a rise " out of the Squire 
 too. He had written him a mysterious letter 
 with a skewer, inviting him to meet some one 
 who could tell him a great secret about his pro- 
 perty, if he came alone to the Cage on the com- 
 mon. We had very faint hopes of this trick 
 answering, but two of us had been told off to 
 hide by the Cage to see if the Squire did come. 
 Some half-dozen of us went to the cottage where 
 Pat borrowed his gipsy clothes. He soon dressed, 
 and was slouching along the cottage garden in 
 them en route for Miss Smith's, when we saw that 
 he had hitched up his petticoats so high that his 
 trousers could be plainly seen beneath. We were 
 going to call him back, when whom should we 
 see coming up to the garden gate but the Doctor? 
 Back we ran into the cottage, but Pat slouched 
 on, quite unconscious of the trouser-legs that 
 betrayed him. He made a demure bob to the 
 Doctor (we could see that he looked rather
 
 92 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 scared, though), and was passing on, but the 
 Doctor stopped him. 
 
 "Oh, you 're the gipsy I Ve heard about lately," 
 said the Doctor. "What 's your name, my pretty 
 girl?" 
 
 "Jenny Giles, your honour," answered Pat, 
 making another bob, and trying to get away. 
 
 But the Doctor laid his hand on Pat's shoulder, 
 and said, 
 
 "Jenny Giles, is it? Then I must take you 
 into custody on suspicion of stealing a pair of 
 trousers belonging to a pupil of mine of the name 
 of M'Carthy," and he tapped Pat on the legs 
 with his stick. 
 
 Then the Doctor saw us, and made us come 
 out and tell him all about it ; and a nice lecture 
 we had when we got back to school, and we were 
 not allowed to go out of bounds for a month 
 afterwards. That did not satisfy Miss Smith, 
 however, when she found how she had been done. 
 She sent a note to the Doctor to tell him he was
 
 FUNNY PAT. 93 
 
 a "disgrace to his sect," for encouraging his 
 young vagabonds in insulting respectable folk 
 that could buy him up twice over he ought to 
 have half-thrashed the life out of the young black- 
 guards. We should have got a licking if the 
 Doctor had not caught us at least the two told 
 off for the Cage would. The Squire had smelt 
 a rat, and sent his bailiff to the common with a 
 horsewhip, and orders to lay it about the shoul- 
 ders of any one he found prowling round the 
 Cage. And the bailiff had mounted guard there 
 for three hours and more. 
 
 "Faith, then, it's a comfort to think we got 
 some fun out of somebody," said incorrigible Pat, 
 when he heard the news.
 
 VII. 
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 
 
 WE always had a whole holiday on the 
 Doctor's birthday, and spent it by the 
 sea at Samphire Marshby. The Doctor hired a 
 'bus and all kinds of traps at Dulchester, and we 
 had a jolly ride to Marshby, and a jolly day 
 there, and a jolly ride back. A nice row we used 
 to make when we drove through Dulchester and 
 the roadside villages. The people came to their 
 doors to stare, just as if we had been troops on 
 the march. It was almost the only excitement 
 some of the quiet country folk had in the year, 
 to see the "Axleford young gen'lemen out a- 
 plasurin." The Doctor had been kind enough to
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 95 
 
 get born in the last week in May, when all the 
 leaves are out, but still in the full freshness of 
 their green, and when it is pretty sure to be 
 warm, and yet not too warm. A first-rate time 
 that is, both for a ride through the country and 
 a day by the sea. 
 
 Blustering Fred Chapman always came out 
 very strong on the Doctor's birthday. Perhaps 
 Fred wasn't such a bad sort of fellow at bottom, 
 but he was the kind of chap that schoolboys are 
 apt to call " no end of an ass." He went about 
 like a gale of wind or a roaring lion, and did 
 everything with a splutter. According to Fred, 
 no other fellow could do anything half as well as 
 he could, or had things half as good, or friends 
 half as rich, clever, and remarkable in every way 
 as his own. It was no use trying to get in a 
 word against Fred. " He 'd talk a dog's hind- 
 leg off, that young feller would," the disgusted 
 old gardener used to say, when Fred had been 
 laying down the law about cucumbers and car-
 
 96 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 nations, and things of that kind. I don't know 
 what his friends made of Fred. He would have 
 done famously for either an Old Bailey lawyer 
 or a Cheap Jack. Fred himself talked as if he 
 could have his choice between being made Prime 
 Minister, or Commander-in-Chief, or Lord Chan- 
 cellor, or Archbishop of Canterbury. We called 
 him Frederick the Great, and he took the name 
 quite seriously. 
 
 One "Doctor's birthday" I sat close by his 
 blustering majesty on the road to Marshby, and 
 had to spend part of the day when we got there 
 with him. If I tell you a little of how he went 
 on then, it will give you a notion of the way he 
 always went on. 
 
 When the traps came about six in the morning 
 to Axleford (we had a scrambling kind of break- 
 fast before we started, and then another picnic 
 breakfast when we got to Marshby), Chapman 
 went about looking at the harness, and lifting up 
 the horses' feet, and talking about "points," and
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 97 
 
 " pasterns," and " barrels," and " Roman noses," 
 as if he was a horse-dealer. The drivers thought 
 at first that he must know something about 
 horses, but they soon found out that he didn't 
 know anything, and then they poked fun at 
 him. 
 
 " There 's an old screw," he said, pointing to 
 one horse; "your master ought to be ashamed 
 to send such a thing as that out of his yard." 
 
 " Sich a thing as that ! " the driver answered. 
 " Why, there ain't a better 'oss in the stables, an' 
 he 's on'y risin' four ; an' you don't call tJiat hold, 
 do ye, sir ? You jist look in his mouth." 
 
 Chapman tried to, but he knew just as well 
 how to set about it as a cat knows how to play 
 the fiddle. The horse laid down his ears, and 
 wriggled his head about, and when he did open 
 his mouth, it was to give a grab at Chapman that 
 made him hop back like a parched pea. 
 
 " You 're out o' practice, I s'pose, sir, bein' at 
 school so long," the man grinned. " This is the
 
 98 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 way you should take 'old on 'em. Now then, you 
 give a look at his teeth." 
 
 Chapman tried to look very wise, and then 
 he shouted, 
 
 " I knew I was right that horse is twenty 
 years old, if he 's a day." 
 
 " Why didn't you say two 'underd, when you 
 was about it ? Much you knows about 'osses," 
 was the contemptuous rejoinder. 
 
 Chapman began to bluster about the lots of 
 horses his uncle kept, but it had no effect upon 
 the man, except to make him, as we thought, 
 quite witty. 
 
 "Ah, yes, I expect all the 'osses you knows 
 about is at your uncle s, an' you never takes 'em 
 hout." 
 
 Chapman was very savage when he saw us 
 laughing, and wanted to make us believe that it 
 was the man and not himself who knew nothing 
 about horses only we didn't. 
 
 The 'bus started first, with nearly a score of
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 99 
 
 small boys stowed inside, and about a dozen 
 middle-sized fellows outside. Blustering Fred, 
 of course, monopolized the box-seat, and I sat 
 just behind him. It was a beautiful morning ; 
 we had all got pea-shooters, and plenty of peas ; 
 and we should have been as jolly as the larks 
 that were singing up all round us if it had not 
 been for Chapman's blather. 
 
 As soon as we got outside the gates, he wanted 
 to drive "tool the tits," he called it, being so 
 very " knowing." But the driver had taken Mr. 
 Fred's measure, and wouldn't let him until we 
 were on the other side of Dulchester, and then 
 the man only let Fred touch the reins (" finger- 
 ing the ribbons," Fred called it) when the road 
 was quite straight, and level, and empty for a 
 long way ahead. Fred was very indignant ; but 
 the man was not going to risk his own place, and 
 his horses' knees, and our necks, for such a tip as 
 Chapman was likely to give him. If Frederick 
 the Great, however, often looked very sulky on his 
 
 7 2
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 box-seat throne, the rest of us had a very merry 
 ride. We peppered the few cottages we passed on 
 the road to Dulchester, and the women and girls 
 came to the doors to grin, and the small boys 
 ran out into the gardens and returned our fire of 
 peas with pebbles. We peppered the servant-girls 
 that were cleaning the windows, and washing the 
 doorsteps, and shaking the mats, and the men 
 and boys who were taking down shop shutters 
 and sweeping out shops, as we drove through 
 clean, quiet, sunny Dulchester ; and the people 
 seemed to think it good fun to be peppered, and 
 knocked off work to chaff and to be chaffed. On 
 the other side of Dulchester, where the road ran 
 once more between straggling, tangled hedges, 
 freshly green, and freshly green hedgerow trees, 
 as yet unclogged with dust, with still more freshly 
 green young corn beyond, and lush grass, and 
 golden buttercups, and tasselled tufts of cowslips, 
 starry ox-eyes, and a dredging, like silvery flour, 
 of daisies and ladies'-smock, " cuck-oo, cuck-oo "
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 101 
 
 constantly sounded so close to us that we felt 
 half angry, because we could not see where the 
 sound came from. And there were grey-tilted 
 carriers' carts to fire volleys into ; and farmers, 
 with brown-red faces like well-done roast-beef, 
 weighing down their gigs on one side, or jog- 
 ging along on horses as plump as themselves; 
 and the people cheered, though we did pepper 
 them, when we drove through the villages ; and 
 in one there was a whole girls' school peeping 
 over their mossy garden wall, and wishing that 
 they were going to the sea-side with us. We 
 wished so, too ; for the girls looked very pretty 
 in their sprigged muslins, and without their 
 bonnets. It was " quite a picture " to see them 
 in the half-sunny, half-shady old garden, full of 
 flowering lilacs and laburnums, apple trees and 
 ribes, flags, lavender, lilies of the valley, purple 
 stocks and wallflowers, that we could smell a 
 hundred yards off, and red and white hawthorn, 
 and red and white roses, too, for everything
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 was very forward that bright May. We were, at 
 any rate. Although we only saw them once a 
 year (they were indoors when we went back in 
 the evening), we carried on a kind of flirtation 
 with the Goose Green girls, and gave them an 
 annual bombardment of pink cocked-hat billets- 
 a'ciu', ballasted with comfits, and little dolls, 
 and packets of acidulated drops and all kinds 
 of sweetstuff. We were too gallant to fire peas 
 at them. Chapman had tried hard to get the 
 man to let him drive past " The Misses Cand- 
 lers' Seminary for Young Ladies," but the man 
 wouldn't ; so Chapman tried hard to look as if 
 he had only given up the reins for a minute or 
 two, that he might have his hands free to pelt 
 the girls, and take off his hat, and kiss his fingers 
 to them. But Blustering Fred made a mull of 
 his politeness. He snatched a packet of lollies 
 from one of the fellows behind to fling to the 
 girls, and the girls cried out, " Oh, you stingy ! " 
 They wouldn't look at him when he was blowing
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 10., 
 
 them kisses, but they did look at him, and laugh 
 at him too, when he dropped his hat into a puddle, 
 and had to get down to pick it up, and run after 
 the 'bus rubbing the mud off, and shouting, be- 
 cause the driver had started again as soon as 
 Fred was down. 
 
 Fred could roar, as I have told you, and there- 
 fore the man had no excuse ; but he pretended 
 not to hear Fred until we got outside the village 
 on to the common dotted with golden furze, 
 and grey and white geese which had given 
 Goose Green its name. There the man stopped, 
 and when Chapman came up panting, the saucy 
 fellow said with a sly grin, 
 
 "Law, sir, I thought you did it a-purpose, to 
 have a chat with the young ladies that seemed 
 so fond of ye, an' then come on by the next 
 wehicle." 
 
 Fred jumped at this salve to his dignity, and 
 'talked as if what the man had said was just what 
 he had meant to do, if he had not found that we
 
 104 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 were a long way ahead of all the other " wehicles." 
 But we grinned so, when he climbed up into his 
 seat and the driver grinned so, too that Fred 
 got quite furious. To smooth down his ruffled 
 feathers, Fred was allowed to drive across the 
 common, though there was a donkey-cart in sight. 
 We came up to it in the middle of the common, 
 where four roads crossed beneath a white finger- 
 post in a little diamond-shaped island of green 
 turf. Just before we got there, one of the donkeys 
 that were dragging their clogs over the common 
 began to bray, and directly afterwards all the 
 rest were braying in chorus, and the donkey in 
 the cart stood stock-still in the middle of the 
 road, and lifted up his head and hee-hawed al- 
 most under the noses of our horses. They tried 
 to shy, but they shied opposite ways, and so they 
 only knocked their heads together ; they tried to 
 jib, but the 'bus was too heavy for them ; and 
 so off they started at full gallop. Fred had no 
 more command over them than a baby, and yet
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 105 
 
 he would keep hold of the reins when the man 
 tried to snatch them from him. We capsized the 
 donkey-cart, we carried away one of the arms of 
 the finger-post, and yet Blustering Fred was so 
 proud of his driving that he still wouldn't let go of 
 the reins, and made confusion worse confounded. 
 A little way beyond the finger-post the road 
 sloped between high furze-banks into a steep hill, 
 that would have brought the collars almost on to 
 the horses' ears if we had been going down quietly 
 and with the skid on. Down that we rattled at 
 an awful rate. The 'bus rolled like a ship at sea. 
 The youngsters inside squealed like passengers 
 battened down under hatches in a storm. We 
 outsides had to hold on like sailors reefing in 
 the " roaring forties." Our faces as well as our 
 knuckles grew very white. Fred was as scared 
 as any of us, and would have been glad enough 
 to give up the reins then, but he seemed not to 
 know how, until the driver plumped himself down 
 on Fred's knees, and grabbed the reins below
 
 106 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 Fred's hands. We were half-way up the hill be- 
 yond the hollow at the foot of the common, 
 however, before the horses were pulled up. Fred 
 looked rather crestfallen when he crawled out, 
 crushed and crumpled, from beneath the man 
 who had made a cushion of him ; and he had 
 to go back to pick up the whip that he had 
 dropped ; but by the time we got to Marshby, 
 he was talking as big as ever, and making out 
 that, if it had not been for him, we should all 
 have broken our necks. 
 
 We gave Fred as wide a berth as we could at 
 Marshby. When you want to enjoy yourself, you 
 know, it is not pleasant to have a fellow close by 
 who is always trying to make you believe that 
 you have no business to be enjoying yourself, 
 because what you are seeing and doing is not 
 nearly so fine as what he has seen and done 
 somewhere else. 
 
 Samphire Marshby certainly is not a very beau- 
 tiful watering-place. There is a dreary marsh be-
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 107 
 
 hind it, and the cliffs are only crumbling earth 
 that is always dropping into the sea. Great bits, 
 with corn still upright on them, plump and slide 
 down upon the sands. There is a huge zigzag 
 crack in the sea-wall of the Esplanade too, that 
 makes you think that that, and the Terrace 
 houses on the top of it, will soon be gobbled up 
 by the pea-soupy waters that swallowed the old 
 church and hundreds of acres of good wheat- 
 land, long before Marshby became a watering- 
 place. Still, Marshby has boats and bathing- 
 machines, and donkeys and goat-chaises, and a 
 jetty and a preventive station, and two martello 
 towers, and a lofty landmark with corkscrew 
 stairs up to the top, and an " antediluvian cliff," 
 full of shells all turned the wrong way ; and a 
 good beach with sea-weedy groynes to jump 
 and clamber over : so we used to make ourselves 
 very jolly there, though Chapman was always 
 saying, " Ah, you Ve never been at Tenby " and 
 a score of other places. According to his own
 
 io8 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 account, he had done wonders in the swimming, 
 fishing, and boating line in the watering-places 
 he went to in the holidays. He said, indeed, 
 that he had steered a fife-boat that went out 
 from Torquay to rescue the crew of a wrecked 
 West Indiaman. But we did not put much 
 faith in Master Fred's stories. It seemed so 
 strange that he should be such a hero at other 
 watering-places where we couldn't see him, and 
 yet such a muff at Marshby where we could see 
 him. When he bathed there, h'e never went in 
 much over his waist, and he used to cut ashore 
 as soon as he saw a big, curling, curly wave 
 coming. As for rowing! He made all kinds 
 of grand excuses before we could get him into 
 a boat ; but, when he did get in, he was always 
 catching crabs, if he took an oar, and that was 
 all the fishing he did. Nevertheless, he used to 
 go on bragging as loudly as ever about his boat- 
 ing in places where there was " a real sea on not 
 a muddy ditch like the Samphire Marshby sea."
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 109 
 
 That day I am telling you about, I was un- 
 lucky enough to go out in a sailing-boat which 
 Fred had helped to hire. The boatman let him 
 steer, because he boasted so, but Chapman didn't 
 even know what "port" and "starboard" meant. 
 Whatever the man said, Chapman always put 
 the boat's head just where he oughtn't to have 
 put it. We ran foul of another boat, and we 
 were nearly capsized in a puff of wind because 
 Chapman hauled in the sheet when the man 
 shouted " Let go," and we got almost under the 
 paddles of the Fire Queen, from London, as she 
 splashed up alongside the jetty; and then Chap- 
 man managed to jam us between two of the 
 blistered, brown-black jetty piles. The boat 
 crunched like a crushed basket, and pop ! pop ! 
 went the pods of the sea-weed that hung from 
 the piles like dishevelled hair, as we ground 
 against them. The people leaning over the rails 
 of the steamboat and the jetty chaffed Master 
 Fred nicely on his seamanship ; and so did we
 
 I io THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 when we got safe ashore. But when he was safe 
 ashore he talked as big as ever. The Marshby 
 people, he said, were only half-and-half sailors, 
 and the steamboat people were mere Cockneys 
 none of them really understood anything about 
 sailing a boat he was always right when he 
 went out with South-coast men and West-coast 
 men they didn't even know the right names of 
 things on the East coast he had done just what 
 the man had really told him to do, though he 
 did think it was wrong, because he felt bound 
 to obey orders and so on, and so on. 
 
 Fred deserved to get chaffed, didn't he ? But 
 then, unfortunately, chaffing him was very much 
 like peppering a hippopotamus with peas. 
 
 I didn't see any more of Fred that day until 
 the 'bus was just going to start for Axleford 
 again in the evening dusk. The rest of us took 
 donkeys and tried to get up a steeple-chase over 
 the wooden breakwaters when we landed from 
 the boat; but Fred was "too much of a man" to
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. in 
 
 ride a donkey. The fact was that he didn't like 
 being sent every now and then over the donkey's 
 head; but since one's "dignity" is the only 
 thing that gets hurt in such a spill on sand, that 
 seems to me the best bit of fun in sea-shore 
 donkey-riding. 
 
 After our steeple-chase we joined the other 
 fellows, who were clustering for dinner on the 
 beach ; but, though Fred's appetite was nearly 
 as big as his talk, he was not fussing about the 
 hampers as usual, as if he was the only one who 
 knew how a sea-side picnic ought to be managed. 
 After dinner we scattered again, with orders to 
 muster for tea before starting at the Porto Bello 
 Inn, where the traps were put up, at about 8 P.M. 
 We had more boating and donkey-racing, and 
 we bathed and lolled on the sunny sands, and 
 made ducks and drakes on the sunny waters with 
 smooth little bits of tile and slate and stone, 
 and we picked up sea-weed and shells on the 
 beach, and got our fingers nipped by trying to
 
 H2 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 catch little crabs, and borrowed nets from the 
 shrimper-boys and girls, who were plodding along 
 the shore knee-deep, pushing their nets before 
 them ; but though we tried to push just as the 
 shrimpers did, we didn't get much besides wet 
 trousers. We wandered down to the marshes, 
 too, and picked samphire to pickle foi our bed- 
 room suppers on the sly; and we chatted with 
 the brown, civil coast-guardmen lounging about 
 their canvas-covered boat, basking in the sun- 
 light, and their brass gun that blazed like half 
 a dozen golden thistles, and cleaning and sharp- 
 ening their cutlasses and pistols in the cool dark 
 beat-shed ; and the grey-haired lieutenant, with 
 a gold band round his cap, came out of his 
 whitewashed little house, and talked to us and 
 we were very much astonished to find that such 
 a veteran had not fought at Trafalgar and been 
 all over the world, and that he seemed as pleased 
 at getting fresh people, though they were only 
 schoolboys, to talk to, as any old cottage-woman
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 113 
 
 at Axleford would have been ; and the Irish 
 sailor left in charge of the one occupied martello 
 tower let us in when we crossed the plank bridge 
 over the stagnant moat, and took us up to the 
 top of the tower, and showed us where the gun 
 used to stand, and made jokes, and generally 
 proved himself a very pleasant fellow, although 
 we could not help looking severely at him when 
 he, a mere common sailor (an Irish sailor, too), 
 took the unwarrantable liberty of ridiculing the 
 English of boys belonging to far-famed (in Cal- 
 fmghamshire) Axleford School. We had asked 
 him, very politely, if we might go over the tower, 
 and he had answered, very impertinently, "Faith, 
 no, unless ye want to break your necks." And 
 we climbed up to the top of the landmark, and 
 saw the green sea and the green land spread out 
 beneath us like an embossed map. Altogether, 
 the time passed so pleasantly that we never 
 thought of Chapman. We did not think of him 
 at tea-time either, or after tea until the traps
 
 114 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 were pushed and pulled out of the cart-sheds, 
 and the horses came clumping over the thresholds 
 of the stables, and we were told off again for the 
 ride home. Then Chapman was missed, but no 
 one had seen or heard of him since the morning. 
 Notwithstanding or rather because of his 
 bluster, however, we felt pretty sure that he had 
 not run into any danger, and so off we went, ex- 
 pecting he would turn up in time to come on in 
 one of the other traps. "We can git over the 
 loss of his hinterestin' serciety," the driver of our 
 'bus remarked. But when we had got about a 
 quarter of a mile from Marshby, up started some- 
 thing naked from the ditch, and shouted to us to 
 stop. It was poor Fred, with only a wet hat and 
 one waterlogged boot on. He told us a cock- 
 and-bull story about his having stripped to swim 
 out to the rescue of an old gentleman in a Bath 
 chair, whom he had seen overtaken by the tide 
 about a mile from shore, and about his clothes 
 being stolen whilst he was away, and his having
 
 BLUSTERING FRED. 115 
 
 to creep round by the back of the cliff and over 
 the marshes, and hide in the ditch to wait for us, 
 because he was ashamed to walk into the town 
 in buff. All except the last part sounded very 
 mythical, but, of course, that wasn't a time to 
 cross-question Fred. The driver lent him a top- 
 coat, and two horse-cloths, and two nosebags to 
 put his feet into, and he had to ride home inside, 
 muffled up like a mummy, instead of cutting a 
 swell and cracking jokes on the box-seat. We 
 found out afterwards how Fred had lost his 
 clothes. He always said that the story was all a 
 lie ; but putting what we guessed with what we 
 heard from a coast-guardman who had been on 
 the cliff at the time, together, we could account 
 for Fred's unfledged state without having to tax 
 our imaginations to get up an invalid old gentle- 
 man. 
 
 Just beyond the landmark at Marshby, where 
 the coast-line turns in towards the backwater 
 
 that sprawls like a slate-coloured glove spread 
 
 82
 
 li 6 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 out on a green table-cloth, there is a sheltered, 
 
 long, level bit of beach. Fred had gone to bathe 
 
 there by himself, because he could go a long 
 
 way out without getting very deep, and in fine 
 
 weather the water there was almost as smooth 
 
 as a mill : pond. He had forgotten, though, that 
 
 the tide came in very fast over the flat sands; 
 
 and whilst he was splashing in the lukewarm 
 
 water, all his clothes, excepting the foundered 
 
 hat and boot, had gone afloat, and were far 
 
 beyond his reach when he got back to land. 
 
 There was nothing really to be ashamed of in 
 
 all this ; but Fred still stuck to the story of the 
 
 Bath chair. When we want other people to think 
 
 us wiser, and braver, and in every way greater 
 
 geniuses and heroes than we are, we mean a lot 
 
 of big lies, and are sadly tempted to tell a lot of 
 
 big lies when we are afraid that our sham Is seen 
 
 through.
 
 VIII. 
 
 HONEST NED. 
 
 HONESTY" was the name by 
 which Ned Hargreaves went at Axle- 
 ford ; and though it is sometimes given to 
 donkeys, it was a name to be proud of. Most 
 of us, I hope, were " indifferent honest," in word 
 and deed, at any rate ; but Ned was thoroughly 
 honest in thought as well as word and deed. 
 Even fellows who would scorn to tell a down- 
 right lie, or to crib anything from a schoolmate, 
 make " mental reservations " sometimes, and 
 have somewhat lax notions of meum and tuum 
 when other people's orchards, say are con- 
 cerned ; but Ned was honest to the back-bone.
 
 ii8 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 He hated everything underhand, however little 
 under the hand it might be. At least that was 
 the opinion we had of him, and we could not 
 help respecting him accordingly. 
 
 Except his honesty, there was nothing remark- 
 able about Ned. He was an average kind of 
 boy; neither stronger, nor taller, nor better- 
 looking, nor more daring, nor freer-handed, nor 
 cleverer, nor fonder of work than the ruck of 
 boys of his age. We couldn't help wondering 
 sometimes that we respected him as we did. 
 
 The Fifth of November was always a great 
 day with us at Axleford. For a week beforehand 
 we could scarcely do any work for thinking of it. 
 One Fifth, I remember, was an especially jolly 
 day, or rather night. The Doctor had a lot of 
 young ladies staying at his house grown-up and 
 growing-up. The masters wanted to show off 
 before the grown-up ones, and we were in love, 
 a dozen deep, with the growing-up ones ; and 
 therefore we determined to give them a literally
 
 HONEST NED. 119 
 
 " magnificent display of fireworks." The Doctor 
 always subscribed like a brick, but that year, in 
 honour of his guests, he headed the list with a 
 whacking figure, and we and the under-masters, 
 of course, followed suit to the best of our ability. 
 Rockets, Roman candles, flower-pots, maroons, 
 Jacks-in-the-box, Bengal lights, blue lights, Ca- 
 therine-wheels, squibs, crackers, serpents, golden 
 fires, &c., &c., were ordered in such quantities 
 that the Dulchester shopkeeper of whom we 
 ordered them thought at first that we were 
 trying to hoax him. Our bonfire was a regular 
 wood-stack. We were not all, as I have con- 
 tritely confessed, as honest as Ned Hargreaves, 
 and I am afraid that a good many hedges con- 
 tributed to it without their proprietors' permis- 
 sion. The Guy on the top of the pile, moreover, 
 was propped with timber that looked very sus- 
 piciously like the bars of two gates which Farmer 
 Lufkin next morning discovered to be missing. 
 The Guy was a guy. He stood about ten feet
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 high in his wide-mouthed slouched boots, which 
 had been made expressly for him by the village 
 cobbler; and his pockets, his lantern, his hat, 
 and his long-nosed red face were crammed with 
 crackers. The girls had kindly helped us to 
 make his clothes. One of them had sacrificed a 
 muslin scarf to provide Guido Faux with a ruff; 
 and another had re-painted his mask, to make 
 the beard tally exactly with the requirements of 
 " the period." 
 
 Axleford School on that Fifth of November 
 night was the centre of attraction for five miles 
 round. A good many people had been invited 
 to see the show, and a good many more came 
 without being invited. The village folks soon 
 got through their few squibs and crackers, and 
 then, reserving their tar-barrel until our bonfire 
 should have burnt low, swarmed up en masse to 
 climb our trees, and perch themselves on our 
 walls, and to drop from them inside to make raids 
 on squibs that had fallen near, still fizzing. Even
 
 HONEST NED. 121 
 
 Farmer Lufkin, who had no objection to a little 
 entertainment, once in a way, which cost him 
 nothing, strolled down to have a look at the fire- 
 works, little dreaming (since he went away be- 
 fore the bonfire was lighted) that he had been 
 laid under contribution towards our fun. That 
 was a jolly night. The rockets rushed up and 
 broke, and fell in many-coloured stars to a chorus 
 of " Oh oh oh law ! " from the yokels. 
 
 Boom fizz crack bang showering sparks 
 flash blaze omnipresent sulphury smoke 
 dark figures, momentarily illuminated, rushing 
 about and shouting like rollicking revolutionists 
 it is pleasant to think that one could ever get 
 so excited as all of us were that night. And then 
 we would make sudden dashes into the house, 
 and have brief, sweet chats with our almost 
 equally excited Dulcineas, who liked us the 
 better the grimier our faces and fingers were, 
 and helped us liberally to the cake and wine 
 that were going.
 
 122 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 At last our fireworks were exhausted, and the 
 bonfire was lighted. Broader and broader, 
 longer and longer, brighter and brighter, the 
 tongues of flame licked through the wreaths of 
 smoke. They leaped at Guy like dogs trying to 
 pull down a deer, but for a time he stood un- 
 touched, now showing every button, and anon 
 blotted from view by the rolling smoke-clouds. 
 Presently, however, his footing gave way ; he 
 sank into the blazing mass, and his crackers 
 went off like a fire of musketry. Higher and 
 higher now shot the flames the furrows of the 
 nearest fields could be seen as clearly as on a 
 summer day, and the windows of the house 
 flashed ruddy gold from every pane. A servant 
 galloped from the Hall with the Squire's compli- 
 ments, " and if the fire was not put out at once, 
 he should send into Dulchester for the engines." 
 A howl of triumphant derision greeted that pre- 
 sumptuous message ; fresh faggots were heaped 
 upon the fire, and the scared groom went back
 
 HONEST NED. 123 
 
 even faster than he had come thankful that he 
 had not shared the fate of Guy. Round and 
 round the fire we capered and shouted like black 
 fellows. At length the flames were low enough 
 for us to leap through and over them like black 
 fellows ; and, watched as we were from the win- 
 dows, of course we made, or shammed to make, 
 most heroic jumps. But " all that's bright must 
 fade," and, close on to midnight, even our unpre- 
 cedented bonfire had died down into smouldering 
 ashes. We lingered round them, burying the 
 potatoes we had provided for a picnic treat before 
 breakfast on the morrow; but, under-masters' 
 " Now, then, off to bed " having been too long 
 disregarded, the Doctor came out and gave the 
 order in a tone that showed he meant it, and then 
 off we scampered to our bed-rooms. All except 
 Old Honesty. His bed was empty when the last 
 of the other fellows in his bed-room fell asleep, 
 and it was empty when the first of them awoke. 
 As the morning went on we began to wonder
 
 124 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 over Ned Hargreaves's mysterious disappearance; 
 and when breakfast and play-time after it were 
 over, and we had been rung in for forenoon 
 school, and Honest Ned was still non inventus, 
 our speculations became so anxious that we 
 began to fear that we should be obliged to call 
 official attention to his absence. " Telling tales," 
 however, is such unpleasant work to schoolboys, 
 that we held our tongues, waiting for the master to 
 miss him when his class was called up. Of course 
 he was soon missed then. When the consequent 
 inquiries were made, nobody could remember 
 having seen anything of Hargreaves since a little 
 after tea-time on the previous evening. The 
 Doctor looked quite troubled when he heard that 
 Ned could not be found. 
 
 " I never knew Hargreaves do anything that he 
 had reason to be ashamed of," said the Doctor, 
 as he took down his hat to go to make outside 
 inquiries after Ned. " Something serious must 
 have happened to him."
 
 HONEST NED. 125 
 
 " No, sir, nothing serious ; and I am ashamed 
 of myself," was the unexpected answer, as the 
 school-door swung open, and Old Honesty en- 
 tered, looking as if he Jiad reason to be ashamed 
 of himself. His clothes were like a muddy scare- 
 crow's, and he had a puffed purple-black eye, 
 whose involuntary wink was comically out of 
 keeping with the rest of his downcast counte- 
 nance. 
 
 " Why, Hargreaves ! " cried the Doctor in dis- 
 gusted astonishment 
 
 And then, out before us all, Old Honesty told 
 his story. He had started the evening before to 
 pull down the finger-post on the common, as an 
 addition to the bonfire. 
 
 "The fellows had been chaffing me because, 
 they said, I wasn't game enough to get any 
 wood ; and I thought I 'd show them I was game 
 enough to do what they wouldn't do, when there 
 was no harm in it. I didn't think it was stealing 
 to pull up that lying old thing, sir. It's only
 
 126 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 got ' To A ' on it (the rest of the board 's 
 
 broken off), and if that was any guide, it 's got 
 slewed round and points to nowhere particular, 
 except the pond. But a Rural came up, and col- 
 lared me when I was lugging away at the rotten 
 old post. I got away from him, but a lot of the 
 yokels came after me, and pulled me about till 
 the policeman caught hold of me again and 
 I Ve been all night in the Cage, sir ! " 
 
 The Doctor tried to look stern, but his mouth 
 twitched, and at last he could not help joining 
 as heartily as any of us in the burst of laughter 
 which Ned's forlorn condition and frank con- 
 fession provoked between them. 
 
 And yet even Old Honesty was suspected, for 
 a time, of being a sneaking thief. 
 
 From lockers and boxes our "portable pro- 
 perty" vanished in a most mysterious fashion. 
 If a fellow had anything that he was particularly 
 proud of, he was pretty sure not to have it long. 
 Even our bird-seed in the stable was walked into
 
 HONEST NED. 127 
 
 extensively, and bags of marbles laid down for a 
 minute or two in the playground had disappeared 
 when their owners went back to pick them up. 
 We were sorely puzzled. The thief must be 
 everywhere who could it be ? It was almost 
 impossible to believe that the good-natured 
 women-servants would prig things out of our 
 boxes, and, even if they did, what could they 
 want with blood-alleys and hemp-seed ? The 
 man-servant and the boy had access to the 
 stable and the playground and the school-room, 
 but, though " Old Growler " had amply earned 
 his name, it was ridiculous to think that he would 
 rob his growlees ; and the lad who cleaned the 
 boots and knives was never up in the bed-rooms^ 
 We were obliged to believe that either some in- 
 visible "Boy Jones" came down the chimneys, 
 or else that it was one of our own boys that 
 stole the things. 
 
 Well, one night Francis Major went as usual 
 to his box, to take out a pistol he was very proud
 
 128 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 of he used to polish it till it was as smooth 
 and bright as glass, and take aim at the masters' 
 backs and snap caps at them almost before they 
 were out of the door. That night, though he 
 had found the box locked, the pistol was gone. 
 
 " I tell you what it is," cried Francis, " I 'm 
 certain now that it's some fellow belonging to 
 the school that prigs the things the paltry 
 sneak ! It isn't half an hour ago that that pistol 
 was all right in my box. I took it out and put 
 it in again when I came up to get my line ou" 
 of the box, and none of the servants can have 
 been up since then. Why, the little chaps were 
 coming up when T ran down. It must be one of 
 them. Don't say anything about it. We '11 rout 
 their boxes out to-morrow." 
 
 Great was the consternation amongst the little 
 chaps when they found that they were suspected. 
 They gave up their keys willingly enough, how- 
 ever, next day, and Francis and ever so many 
 more fellows went up to the little chaps' bed-
 
 HONEST NED. 129 
 
 room to overhaul their boxes. The pistol wasn't 
 in any of them. 
 
 " I don't see why you should suspect the little 
 chaps any more than the big fellows, Francis," 
 said Ned Hargreaves. " Let "s all have our boxes 
 searched." 
 
 "Stuff!" cried Peter Robinson, who slept in 
 Francis and Hargreaves's room. " As if any of 
 us would do a thing like that ! " 
 
 But when the others agreed to have their boxes 
 searched, Robinson said he was quite agreeable. 
 
 " I must go and get my keys, though I left 
 them in my locker." 
 
 The other fellows waited in the little chaps' 
 bed-room until Robinson came back, and then 
 they went up to No. I bed-room. 
 
 " There, search my box first," cried Robinson, 
 as soon as they got inside the door. 
 
 Nothing was found in it that didn't belong to 
 him. Nothing that didn't belong to the owner 
 was found in any of the boxes until they came 
 
 9
 
 130 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 to Hargreaves's ; but there, just under a rumpled 
 newspaper, lay not only Francis's pistol, but ever 
 so many more things that had "gone a-missing." 
 Hargreaves was dumbfoundered ; most of the 
 other boys looked as if they couldn't believe 
 their eyes ; but Robinson sneered, 
 
 " It 's convenient to be called Old Honesty, 
 ain't it ? ' The demure sow sucks the cow.' " 
 
 I will tell you a little more about Master Peter 
 Robinson in my next chapter.
 
 p. 130
 
 IX. 
 
 PALTRY PETER. 
 
 DID you ever spend the holidays at school ? 
 It sounds dreary, but the fact is not nearly 
 so dismal as the phrase. At any rate, if I had had 
 a pleasanter companion, the Midsummer holidays 
 I once spent at Axleford would have been some 
 of the pleasantest I remember. And it was not 
 until the last week that I found out what kind of 
 fellow my companion was. My pitying classmates 
 had congratulated me on having such a senior as 
 Peter Robinson to share what they considered my 
 exile in Siberia or Cayenne, I ought rather to 
 say, considering the weather. " He 's a little bit 
 too much of a carney," I had been told, " but he 
 
 9 2
 
 132 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 isn't a bad fellow, and you may be sure he won't 
 cock over you." 
 
 The house and grounds seemed strangely silent 
 and solitary on the evening of the still more bust- 
 ling day that succeeded blithe Speech Day. Boys, 
 masters, and even most of the servants, had started 
 for their vacation. The good-tempered matron 
 and two housemaids were the only women left in 
 the house until the "cleaning" began, and Old 
 Growler was the only man upon the premises. 
 It was rather doleful then to ramble about in the 
 school-room, littered with the rubbish of turned- 
 out lockers, and the playground, littered with 
 torn-up exercise and copy-books, and to think of 
 the home welcomes the rest of the fellows had 
 got, or were hurrying to, whilst we were " left 
 lamenting." It was a relief when the yokel-boys 
 presumed to make an incursion into our deserted 
 precincts. Although we chased them out again 
 with vigorous indignation not succeeding in ex- 
 pelling them, however, until Old Growler came
 
 PALTRY PETER. 133 
 
 to our aid with a horsewhip we hoped, for the 
 sake of change, that the saucy rustics would soon 
 return. We could not help feeling rather low- 
 spirited at our first lonely meal taken at the 
 end of a long room, to which the long forms laid 
 on their backs upon the long, clothless tables 
 gave quite an unfamiliar look ; and when we went 
 to bed, in the midst of a far-stretching wilderness 
 of stripped mattresses whose recent incumbents, 
 scattered like the drops of a trundled mop, would 
 turn-in dozens and score? of miles away the 
 hush of the dim, big old house, and the audible 
 tick of the far-off clock upon the stairs, were cer- 
 tainly rather oppressive. We woke jolly enough 
 the next morning. The world was all before us 
 where to choose. We were, in fact, our own 
 masters, so far as the way in which we liked to 
 amuse ourselves was concerned. 
 
 " I trust to your honour, boys, not to get into 
 mischief," the Doctor had said when he went 
 away ; and that, though some mean boys do take
 
 134 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 advantage of it, and sillily chuckle over their own 
 knowingness and the spooniness of their truster, 
 when they do so that, I say, seems to me the 
 best way of keeping boys who have any sense of 
 honour in them and most boys have, I hope 
 out of serious scrapes. The very fact of our being 
 nominally at school made us enjoy our almost 
 unlimited liberty all the mope. The matron and 
 the other women-folk did not interfere with us in 
 any way except to give us specially nice things 
 to eat and drink, in compassionate consideration 
 of our temporary homelessness at holiday-time. 
 When we were guilty of the ordinary schoolboy 
 tricks, which neither of us thought prohibited by 
 the Doctor's parting caution, Old Growler fully 
 availed himself of his power of growling at us ; 
 but his power of restraint was small, and of that, 
 even such as it was, being a good old bear at 
 bottom, he was not disposed to avail himself to 
 its full extent. He was always threatening 
 " Ah, you see if I don't let the master know
 
 PALTRY PETER. 135 
 
 when he comes back ; " but it was a long cry to 
 the Doctor, who was up the Rhine then, and 
 when he did come back, our offences against Old 
 Growler's sense of propriety had so accumulated 
 that he was puzzled to select " a leading case." 
 Being, as I have said before, not a bad old bear 
 at bottom, he compromised matters by winking 
 at all our not very iniquitous iniquities (so far as 
 he knew) ; letting us understand, however, that 
 he considered us, so to speak, bound under per- 
 sonal recognizances to appear for sentence on 
 past crimes, whenever we offended him next half. 
 Peter Robinson had a way of smoothing the old 
 man down that half-flattered and half-angered 
 him. 
 
 " Ah, you can talk, you can, as if butter wouldn't 
 melt in your mouth, 'cos you 're afeard I should 
 split, Mr. Robinson," Old Growler would say ; 
 " I 'd believe ye sooner if you was sarcy like the 
 young 'un there though he is a himpident young 
 limb, as I should like to give a good hidin' to,
 
 136 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 for tramplin' down my beddin'-out plarnts. Bed- 
 din'-out plarnts, with sich as you to have the run 
 o' the garding ! The master may be a wise man, 
 for what I know, with his Greek an' that ; but 
 he can't know much about boys, though he be a 
 schoolmaster, to let you two have the run o' the 
 place." 
 
 After the first two or three days, Robinson left 
 me to amuse myself. He went his way, and I 
 went mine, only meeting in the bed-room and at 
 meal-times. Although he was older than I, I 
 had been a good deal longer at Axleford than he 
 had. The reason he was staying during the holi- 
 days was because he had only come to school a few 
 weeks before the end of the last half. (Private 
 schools did not talk about "terms" in those days.) 
 We did not know much about him, therefore, but 
 the character my classmates had given him seemed 
 just enough to me at first. He did not cock over 
 me, and at first he seemed inclined to make me 
 quite a crony asking me everything about every-
 
 PALTRY PE TER. 1 37 
 
 body belonging to the place. The only thing I 
 did not like about him was a way he had of look- 
 ing out of the corners of his eyes when he had 
 said anything that sounded "queer" just as if 
 he was trying dangerous ice, and wanted to see 
 how far he could go with safety. But when he 
 saw that I did not like what he was saying, he 
 chaffed me so for taking him at his word that I 
 was quite puzzled to make out whether he had 
 been tempting me to join him in something we 
 had no business to do, or trying to spy out whether 
 I had been doing anything of the kind by myself. 
 Altogether, although it was not until the last 
 week of the holidays that I had any substantial 
 reason for thinking him a Paltry Peter, I was 
 not sorry when Robinson left me to my own 
 devices. 
 
 That was a jolly time, although I had no chum 
 to roam about with. I could get up when I liked, 
 go to bed when I liked, wander where I liked, 
 and stay out as long as I liked. When inclined
 
 138 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 for a day out, the motherly old matron would 
 supply me with stores supplemented with multi- 
 tudinous motherly cautions against breaking my 
 bones, or getting drowned, shot, trapped, and a 
 long &c. of serious contingencies ; and if too late 
 for dinner, I had only to go into the kitchen to 
 get a better meal than I should have had if I had 
 been true to time. Old Growler used, of course, 
 when he was in the way, to protest vigorously 
 against these kitchen indulgences. "A boy's belly 
 should tell him when it 's time for dinner," was 
 his elegant phrase; " an' if it don't, he don't want 
 none, or don't ought to have none that 's what 
 / says." But old Growler, as well as myself, was 
 dependent on the kitchen for creature-comforts, 
 and had to retreat growling like a distantly 
 rumbling thunderstorm before the "You ought 
 to be ashamed of yourself" and " Yote. like to 
 have enough, you greedy, grumpy old pig," &c., 
 &c. of the good-natured dispensers of mine. The 
 country was basking in the lazy pomp of full-
 
 PALTRY PETER. 139 
 
 blown, glorious summer. In the early morning it 
 was like dipping one's head into iced millefleur to 
 open a bed-room window. All day long the air 
 was luscious with the scent of limes. Week after 
 week passed by without a drop of rain, except 
 a freshening, dust-laying night-shower now and 
 then, and once, when the cracks in the clay lands 
 seemed gasping for breath, a grand tempest that 
 would have seemed a dream next sunny morning, 
 had it not been for the rain-drops trembling on 
 the hedge-sprays, the rain-pools in the lanes, the 
 sodden flower-petals lying, earth-splashed, on the 
 garden-beds, and the revivified look of the whole 
 country round. The shorn meadows, although 
 they had taken a start for an aftermath, soon 
 turned yellow again. Streaks and patches of gold 
 grew more and more plentiful in the rustling 
 green corn-fields. The spiny green globes of the 
 chestnut trees seemed to swell before one's eyes. 
 Summer fruit might be had for the plucking, and 
 the school and the farm and the cottage gardens
 
 140 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 were rich in promise of green and brown pears 
 and rosy-cheeked and russet apples. Here and 
 there on the hedges an already purple pimple 
 might be picked off the granulated beehives of 
 the plenteous show of blackberries. Lacelike hem- 
 lock-blossom, towering stinging-nettles, honeyed 
 white nettles, and glossy dock-leaves choked the 
 ditches. The flowerless primroses sprawled droop- 
 ing, crinkled leaves, as big as lettuce-leaves, over 
 the hedge-banks, and the hedges were white 
 with a mat of bell-bind, and purple with hanging 
 clusters of nightshade. The woods were darken- 
 ing, but green was still the dominant tone of 
 their sun-gilt tufted fur-like clumps and roundly 
 rising inclined planes green that gleamed out 
 like a bridesmaid standing beside a widower when 
 a young plane-tree stood beside a copper beech. 
 And around the trees, though bare just at their 
 base, the elsewhere shrivelled grass grew lush 
 damascened with blue and pink and yellow wild 
 flowers, and spired with rusty sorrel. The birds
 
 PALTRY PETER. 141 
 
 were growing lazy, but larks still sang all day 
 long, and nightingales all night long, and fitfully 
 by day. Now and then, too, a blackbird would 
 say grace for the fruit on which he had been 
 gorging himself, in a brief snatch of the cooling 
 music he had fluted out far more generously 
 before the fruit was ripe for his greedy golden 
 bill ever and anon crisping the sweetness of his 
 song with a roughness like that of the sweet-sour, 
 cooling black currant The farmers winked at 
 my popping away at the rabbits with the old 
 gun I had borrowed in the village, and winked 
 very good-humouredly too, when the Squire's 
 gamekeeper was not likely to turn-up, though 
 rabbits were reserved with game in their leases ; 
 for the swarming vermin had nibbled some of 
 the fields bare for a couple of " stetches " and 
 more from the hedges that bordered the green 
 woodland lanes. 
 
 " Yow mustn't shoot at them rabbuts, ye know, 
 young master," Farmer Walton said to me one
 
 142 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 
 
 day with a grin. " Squire '11 have ye took up for 
 poachin', though ye are a Latin scholard as ought 
 to know better. I guess though, yow don't hit 
 many, s' long as ye aim at 'em. Theer, I '11 give 
 ye leave to fire off that gun o' yourn, an* scare 
 'em. Theer 's no law agin that, as I knows on. 
 It 's cruel, it is, the way them nasty beasts eats 
 down my earn and turmets. Tain't as if th' old 
 Squire went shootin' hisself, or made it up to ye 
 somehow ; but he lets his shootin', he do, though 
 he is sich a old county gen'leman, to a Lunnon 
 chap as keeps a gin-shop, I Ve heard anyhow, 
 he 's summut in the spirit line. He comes down, 
 an' he blazes away him an' his mates, they does. 
 That 's all fair enough when the gin feller pays 
 for his fun, an' I don't expect he gits much out 
 of it, for thim cockneys ain't much o' shots, an' 
 the Squire 's a precious screw, he be. I wouldn't 
 grumble if 't was made up to me somehow, 
 though it be uncommon aggrawatin* to see fields 
 that you Ve paid money for to be ploughed, an'
 
 PALTRY PETER. 143 
 
 sowed, an' harrered, an' rolled, as bare as your 
 chin, almost, young master, when the years ought 
 to be up over yer yead. The Squire, he never 
 makes it up, he don't. If I was to grumble, he 'd 
 say, ' Your lease is out next Michaelmas, an' you 
 can walk, you can/ The gin feller 's generouser 
 than the Squire, though he be a Lunnoner. He 
 sends me a dozen or two o' wine, or a cask o' 
 stout, or that like ; but what 's that to the 
 vally o' my crops thim brutes has spoiled ? The 
 rabbuts is the wust. The hares is bad, but I 
 wouldn't growl about them, an' I wouldn't say a 
 word about the pa'tridges, if it wasn't for them 
 [condemned] warmin. The Lunnoner gives me 
 a brace or two o' birds, he do. He ain't over 
 free-handed, but he's better than Squire. He 
 wants to git the vally o' his money, though he 
 don't, an' that's all right enough. But I pay 
 money to Squire 's well as he, an' I should like 
 to git the vally on it too. Well, anyhow, yow Ve 
 scared 'em," Farmer Walton added, when, thus
 
 144 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 encouraged, I had pulled the trigger. "But, 
 law bless ye, they'll be back agin, thick 's flies 
 thick 's fleas in two minnuts. I 'm goin' 
 home'ards ; if yow like to come up, an' have a 
 glass o' beer, yow can." 
 
 Besides the rabbit-haunted fields to wander 
 over, there was the little river to bathe, and 
 boat, and fish in. I could take my pick of the 
 miller's boats for a smaller price than I should 
 have had to pay for his leakiest old tub during 
 the half. When the miller's wife, indeed, chanced 
 to be the letter, she let me have the boat for 
 nothing. " It 's a shame, that it is," she would 
 say, "whoever your father, or your mother, or 
 your aunts or uncles is, that they should leave a 
 child o' theirn at school when the rest is a-enjyin' 
 theirselves at home. Theer you go an' enjy 
 yourself; I 'm not a-going to take your money, 
 don't you think it -you, as don't seem to have a 
 home as anybody '11 arsk you to. I am a mother 
 myself, / am. Theer if you '11 promise not to
 
 PALTRY PETER. 145 
 
 be up to any o' your tricks, you shall give my 
 Jemimar Ann a pull, you shall." 
 
 Jemima Ann was a very pretty little damsel, 
 with a crop of golden-brown curls that hung 
 down like tumbled spaniel's ears, and big, dark- 
 and long-lashed eyes, as liquidly and lucently 
 blue as the July sky overhead. She was just 
 my own age, and therefore, of course, considered 
 herself about fifteen years my elder ; making de 
 Jiaut en bas remarks on my rowing, age, stature, 
 strength, and character generally, which rendered 
 her company a somewhat marmaladish sweet. On 
 rare occasions, however, Jemima Ann would come 
 down from her lofty perch of assumed seniority 
 and condescend to treat me as a contemporary. 
 It was heavenly then to glide along the narrow, 
 winding, insect-dimpled reaches, with the golden 
 dust-like gnat swarms humming over the reeds, 
 and the kingfisher, and the swallows, and the 
 dragon-flies zigzagging backwards and forwards, 
 
 and here and there a grave old cow standing 
 
 10
 
 146 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 under the willows, up to her knees in weeds and 
 water, lashing her sides with her tufted tail, and 
 watching Jemima Ann with an " I Ve-a-great- 
 mind-to-tell-your-mother-miss" expression. What 
 the cows saw to make them look in that way, 
 you must not expect me to inform you. Those 
 are fools who kiss and tell. 
 
 That summer, too, the fish bit as if they were 
 weary of their existence. My green and white 
 float began to bob as soon as the line was thrown 
 in. Gudgeons, and perch, and popes, bullheads, 
 and loach, and roach, I pulled up as if all the 
 fish in the little river wanted to get out of its 
 lukewarm water. One day, when I hadn't my 
 rod with me, I saw quite a whopping carp close 
 in by the bank. Well, he waited for me to bend 
 a pin, and tie it on to a top-string, and then he 
 let me lower it, with a bit of currant dumpling 
 on for bait, right down before his nose ; and then 
 he quietly opened his mouth and took the hook, 
 and in two seconds I had him flapping on the
 
 PALTRY PETER. 147 
 
 bank. I caught shy Dr. Tench, too, who goes 
 about curing the other fish when they are ill, or 
 when they have got a hook sticking in them, 
 according to the country people. 
 
 I was able to get on very well, although Robin- 
 son did leave me to myself, you see. Meantime 
 he pottered about by himself, not often going 
 outside the grounds, so far as I could make out. 
 And now for what made me suspect him to be a 
 sneak. 
 
 One evening, when the place was being got 
 into order for the boys' coming back, I ran into 
 the school-room that had just been scrubbed, 
 to get something out of my locker. From the 
 door to one desk, on both sides of it, and back 
 again, there was a chain of marks on the damp 
 floor. At first I thought they were a dog's foot- 
 prints, but when I looked at them more closely, 
 I saw that they had been made by somebody 
 who wore boots or shoes, walking on tiptoe. 
 
 There was yellow clay sticking here and there 
 
 10- 2
 
 J48 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 in these x toe-marks, and a little heap of it was 
 lying under the school-room scraper. There 
 wasn't much in that. Of course, I guessed that 
 Robinson had gone into the school-room before 
 me, and had taken more pains not to dirty the 
 clean floor than I had done in my hurry. At 
 the same time I could not make out why he 
 should have been pottering about those lockers, 
 when his was quite on the other side of the 
 school-room. When I went into the house to 
 supper, Robinson was lying, with his boots off, 
 on a form. 
 
 " Have you been in the school-room ?" I asked. 
 
 " No," he answered, yawning, " I haven't. I 've 
 just come back from Dulchester, and I 'm as tired 
 as a dog. Good night I 'm off to bed." 
 
 And off he went, leaving his boots behind 
 him. I took them up, and though they had been 
 scraped, the same kind of clay that I had seen 
 in the school-room was sticking to the soles. 
 I took them across to the school-room, and the
 
 PALTRY PETER. 
 
 149 
 
 toes just fitted into the marks. Robinson had 
 plainly told me a lie, but what could be his 
 motive ? What harm was there in going into the 
 school-room ? Though the lockers he had gone 
 to were a good way from his own, he couldn't 
 think that I should fancy he had been prigging 
 anything ; for all the lockers were empty. They 
 had all been left unlocked, and one of my amuse- 
 ments had been to make a cannonade in the 
 echoing school-room by banging the lids up and 
 down. I put my hand on one to repeat the 
 performance, but found to my astonishment that 
 it was locked. I was still more astonished when 
 next day I found that it was unlocked again. 
 When I told Robinson about it, he gave me a 
 queer look, and said, "Oh, you must have 
 jammed it in your banging it about, and then 
 you gave a good pull and got it loose again." 
 
 This explanation did not satisfy me, however. 
 I could not help suspecting that there was some- 
 thing queer in Master Peter besides his looks.
 
 150 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 Well, the next half came, and we lost our 
 things right and left, as I told you in my last 
 chapter. What I had noticed during the holi- 
 days made me half fancy now and then that 
 Robinson might know something about the way 
 in which they went ; but still I could not believe 
 that any of our fellows would be paltry enough 
 to be a common prig, and so I held my tongue. 
 When Ned Hargreaves, however, got to be sus- 
 pected, and Robinson crowed over him, I felt 
 sure that Robinson must be the thief, and told 
 some of the big fellows what I had noticed. They 
 thought it looked suspicious, too, and though 
 they could not bring anything home to Robin- 
 son, they grew shy of his company, and at the 
 same time watched him sharply. After the dis- 
 covery of the cache of stolen goods in Ned Har- 
 greaves's box, nothing else was stolen. A few 
 fellows joined with Robinson in saying that the 
 thief had been found out at last ; but most said 
 Yes, he had, they thought, in a very different
 
 PALTRY PETER. 151 
 
 sense. " Don't you mind, Ned the sneak that 
 could take the things out of our boxes could put 
 them into yours," was the consolation very gene- 
 rally given to Hargreaves; but Honest Ned could 
 not be happy so long as the slightest ground of 
 suspicion remained against him, and the prima. 
 facie look of the affair was certainly " nasty " 
 enough to necessitate some charity on the part 
 of his defenders. If the things had been found 
 in anybody else's box, lie would certainly have 
 been suspected of stealing them ; but it seemed 
 so preposterous to think that Hargreaves could 
 be a prig that most of us pooh-poohed the evi- 
 dence against him. 
 
 Honest Ned had to thank the Doctor's monkey 
 for the vindication of his character, and Paltry 
 Peter had to thank it for his detection. One day 
 in the playground Jacko came leaping and jab- 
 bering towards a knot of us, with Robinson rush- 
 ing after him looking pale with fright. Jacko 
 was jangling something in his paws. It was a
 
 T52 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 huge bunch of keys which Robinson had pulled 
 out of his pocket with his handkerchief. Robin- 
 son tried hard to be the first to grab the keys, 
 but Francis Major got them. 
 
 " They 're mine," shouted Robinson. 
 
 " What a lot of boxes you must have where 
 do you keep them?" sneered Francis. "Why 
 this key, I do believe, would fit my box I '11 go 
 and try." 
 
 And up into the bed-rooms he ran, with ever 
 so many of us after him. There were not many 
 boxes that one or other of Robinson's keys would 
 not fit, we found, and ditto as to the lockers. 
 
 " I I I never used 'em they ain't mine 
 I picked 'em up five ztiinutes ago," stammered 
 Paltry Peter, when we surrounded him after our 
 trial of his keys. Of course, we should not have 
 believed him if he had gone on stammering for 
 a twelvemonth ; but, curiously enough, just then 
 an old man pulled up his pony-cart in the lane, 
 and came hobbling into the playground.
 
 PALTRY PETER. 153 
 
 "Where's the young gen'leman as has the 
 fancy for old keys ? " said the old man. " Ah, 
 there he be," he went on, limping up to Robin- 
 son. " I was tellin' a neighbour o' mine how I 'd 
 let ye have my old keys to pick from, an', says 
 he, 'You'll get into trouble what does the young 
 gen'leman want y cm for?' So, as I was a-passin' 
 in my cart, I thought I 'd jist drop in to make sure 
 as all was square." 
 
 The old man was a Dulchester dealer in marine 
 stores, of whom Robinson had bought his bunch 
 during the holidays, availing himself of the op- 
 portunity which they afforded to fit almost every 
 empty locker and school-box with a key. Robin- 
 son, however, flatly denied that he had ever seen 
 the old man before, and still maintained that he 
 had picked up the keys that very morning. 
 
 " Why don't you suspect Camden ?" he asked. 
 " It 's him the old man must mean. He stayed 
 the holidays as well as me, and he was always 
 sneaking about the place like a cat."
 
 154 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 " That 's a lie, Mr. Robinson, and you knows 
 it," said Old Growler, who had come up to see 
 what the hubbub was about. " The young 'un 's 
 a mischeevious young limb, but it 's you as was 
 allus sneakin' about. I wish I 'd known what you 
 was arter. Anyhow, the master shall know your 
 goins on now." 
 
 Old Growler made his report to the Doctor, 
 and the issue of the whole matter was that Paltry 
 Peter was expelled.
 
 X. 
 
 JOLLY JIM. 
 
 JAMES CRISP does not sound a very jolly 
 name rather the other thing ; but James 
 Crisp was such a jolly fellow that everybody at 
 Axleford liked him. I do not know that there is 
 any particular merit in being jolly. Jolly folks 
 seem to me to be born jolly, but it is a very jolly 
 thing to be born jolly. 
 
 Jolly Jim, as I have said, was a favourite with 
 everybody masters, and servants, and village 
 people, as well as boys, although, so far as I 
 remember, he did not trouble himself much to 
 win their favour. He was ready enough to do 
 kind things, but not more so than a good many
 
 156 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 fellows who were not half such favourites as he 
 was. But Jim had always a merry look and a 
 merry word for everybody, and so everybody 
 had a kind look and word for him. He was not 
 a remarkably witty fellow, and yet, whatever 
 Jie said, people were sure to laugh. Even Old 
 Growler had a grin for Jolly Jim, and the women 
 folk made such a pet of him that we should have 
 been very jealous, if we had not made such a pet 
 of him too. He was a very useful pet, because, 
 whenever we happened to put the Doctor out a 
 little, Jolly Jim could always talk and laugh 
 him round again. 
 
 But at last another king arose in Axleford, 
 who was a bear to all of us, but made himself a 
 special beast to Jolly Jim. The Doctor was 
 taken ill, and had to go away to the south of 
 France for nearly the whole of a half; and whilst 
 he was away, a Mr. Buntingford reigned in his 
 stead. Some naughty people say that when 
 ministers take a holiday, they always engage the
 
 JOLLY JIM. 157 
 
 greatest sticks that they can find to preach for 
 them during their absence, in order that their 
 congregations may make all the more of them 
 when they come back. Of course I don't believe 
 that, or suppose that the Doctor had any such 
 motive ; but, if he had, he could not have picked 
 out a better beast than Buntingford to make us 
 long to see him at his desk again. Buntingford 
 was almost the exact opposite of the Doctor in 
 everything. He couldn't do anything with his 
 hands, and mathematics was the only thing he 
 really knew anything about. We soon found out 
 that he had a lot of keys for exercises, and cribs. 
 Before he called up a Latin or Greek class, we 
 could see him with his head down under his 
 desk-lid, trying to make out the construing and 
 a nice boggle he made of it after all. After a 
 bit, we used to try off the wildest translations on 
 him almost as bad as the famous one that every 
 schoolboy has heard of : Semiramis condidit 
 Babyloniam coctilibus muris "Semiramis built
 
 158 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 Babylon with cocktailed mice." And yet he was 
 so conceited that he sneered at the under-masters 
 when we gave the quite correct construings that 
 they had given us. Of course, we could not help 
 seeing that he did understand mathematics a 
 good deal too well for our liking. For one thing 
 we did not relish being for ever dosed with ma- 
 thematics, and, for another, we grudged having 
 to own that Buntingford knew anything about 
 anything. He was as fond of cutting our play- 
 time short as the Doctor had been of stretching 
 it out. He never played with us, or joked with 
 us, or took any interest, except a spitefully spy- 
 ing tyrant's, in anything we did out of school. 
 
 I have said that he could not do anything with 
 his hands, but I should have added that it was 
 literally " a caution," as the Yankees say, to see 
 (and still more to feel) him flog a fellow or box 
 a fellow's ears. We wanted to be able to think 
 Buntingford a milksop, because he never did any- 
 thing that we thought manly ; but we could not
 
 JOLLY JIM. 159 
 
 exactly manage that He was such a sturdy, 
 broad-shouldered little beast, and he did not 
 seem a bit afraid of the hatred with which he 
 was daily more and more regarded by everybody 
 at Axleford, except the writing-master. At first, 
 the drill-sergeant also had a faint liking for Bunt- 
 ingford he received so willingly and responded 
 so eagerly to the sergeant's reports for punish- 
 ment. But one day the sergeant saw Buntingford 
 knock the head of a little boy who had been re- 
 ported backwards and forwards with clenched 
 fists, and then the sergeant looked very much 
 inclined to knock down the knocker. 
 
 Until the Doctor returned, the sergeant never 
 gave in another report. He seemed to be almost 
 as anxious for the Doctor's return as we were, 
 although he was good enough to say after the 
 little incident referred to 
 
 " Well, gentlemen, ye ain't nigh so troublesome 
 as ye used to be. If ye 'd always behave like this, 
 I wouldn't report ye to nobody, let alone that "
 
 i6o THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 The sergeant's sense of discipline prevented 
 him from finishing his sentence, but we tho- 
 roughly understood how he wished to characterize 
 Buntingford ; and even the grumpy sergeant was 
 thenceforward quoted at a premium in Axleford. 
 
 Buntingford was tolerably impartial in letting 
 us see that he hated us all to a very considerable 
 extent ; but his concentrated hatred was reserved 
 for Jolly Jim. Buntingford's excuse was that 
 Jim, although a big fellow, was not yet out of 
 the first book of Euclid. He had tilted at "the 
 windmill," and had been foiled. When put 
 back to the First Proposition, he had vaguely 
 remembered that, chiefly in consequence of the 
 intersecting circles' resemblance to patten-marks, 
 but everything beyond had seemed virgin ground 
 to him, and again and again he had slid back 
 ignominiously on the hither side of the Pons 
 Asinorum. 
 
 " I could understand it somehow with the 
 Doctor," Jim used to say. "If I couldn't say it
 
 JOLLY JIM. 161 
 
 all, I could make it out when he was showing 
 me what I ought to have said, though I couldn't 
 remember anything about it five minutes after- 
 wards. But Grisly gets into such a rage if you 
 haven't got all those spider's-web things at your 
 finger's ends that he 'd drive it out of your head 
 if you did know it. What 's the odds, though, so 
 long as you 're happy ?" 
 
 Jolly Jim's marked inaptitude for geometrical 
 demonstration, no doubt, had something to do 
 with the marked dislike with which Grisly re- 
 garded him ; but Jim's sunny disposition, and 
 the favour which it won for him from every one 
 except Grisly, had more. At school-time, at 
 meal-times, in the bed-rooms, in the playground, 
 and even in church, Buntingford was always try- 
 ing to make Jolly Jim look small. That he was 
 an idiotic dunce, and that we were very little 
 better for thinking so much of him, was the 
 opinion which Buntingford seemed to want to 
 
 drive into us all. 
 
 11
 
 1 62 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 He did not succeed. We liked Jim the better 
 for the persecution he underwent. He was so 
 everlastingly kept in, that at last the under- 
 masters used to scowl openly, and bang down 
 their desk-lids, when he got a fresh imposition ; 
 and the housekeeper used to come over to com- 
 fort him, and did not scruple to declare, in Bun- 
 tingford's hearing, that " it was a shame, that it 
 was, and she 'd write to the master and the missis. 
 She wasn't a-going to see a fine young gentleman 
 have his health took away like that." The ser- 
 vants all snarled and snapped at Buntingford, 
 and the village boys shouted "Grisly" after him, 
 when he happened to be out after dusk. 
 
 If the other masters had backed Buntingford, 
 I think there would have been a mutiny; but, 
 as we could see that they hated Buntingford 
 almost as much as we did, the half's work some- 
 how jolted on. We paid the under-masters, in- 
 deed, exceptional deference, to make Buntingford 
 savage. And more and more savage he grew.
 
 JOLLY JIM 163 
 
 His cane was always going like a flail. How we 
 did long for the Doctor to come back ! Almost 
 the only sweet-tempered person that still slept 
 under the roof of the school-house was Jolly 
 Jim. " What 's the odds so long as you 're 
 happy?" he still kept on asking, until we got 
 almost angry even with him. It seemed mean 
 in him somehow to be happy badgered as he 
 was. Buntingford used to look at Jim as if he 
 would uncommonly like to lay the cane about 
 his shoulders ; but, barring the incapacity for ma- 
 thematics, there was really no scholastic charge 
 to bring against Jim, and Buntingford, in spite 
 of his sturdy swagger, was, like most tyrants, a 
 bit of a coward at heart, and therefore chary of 
 flogging the big fellows. 
 
 He discovered, however, that amongst the little 
 fellows there was one whom Jolly Jim "knew 
 at home," and had promised to take care of at 
 school. " Shrimp," as we called this urchin, was 
 
 an ailing little fellow, who did neither harm nor 
 
 11 2
 
 1 64 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 good. Scarcely any one, except Jim and the 
 housekeeper, took any notice of him, until Bun- 
 tingford found him out and began to bully him 
 abominably. As long as the bullying was con- 
 fined to "jawings," "impositions," and "keep- 
 ings-in," Jolly Jim contented himself with trying 
 to comfort his little proteg6 with his " What 's 
 the odds ?" formula, adding, " It 's a jolly shame, 
 but Christmas is coming, and Grisly won't be 
 here next half." As Shrimp was not happy, he 
 found considerable odds between his previous 
 blissful obscurity and the disagreeable notoriety 
 into which Buntingford had brought him. He 
 did his best, however, to look comforted, and 
 even enjoyed after a fashion the extra petting 
 which the persecuted patron, for whose sake he 
 was persecuted, gave him. 
 
 But one afternoon, in the beginning of De- 
 cember, Grisly was in a towering rage. The 
 servants had been saucy to him, and the woman 
 at the post-office had given him what she called
 
 JOLLY JIM. 165 
 
 a "comfortable bit of her mind." He came back 
 from the village, and had us at once rung into 
 school, although there was still at least a quarter 
 of an hour of play due to us. He took out his 
 cane and rapped his desk with it in terrorem, 
 and called up Shrimp's class. He was going to 
 examine it, he said he kept his boys up to the 
 mark, and he would see that the other masters 
 did not neglect tJieir duty. I forget what it was 
 he examined the class in, but I remember dis- 
 tinctly that, for something some other boy had 
 said, he told Shrimp to hold out his hand. 
 
 "Don't!" shouted Jolly Jim, starting up, and 
 looking very unlike his jolly self. 
 
 "Crisp, sit down," said the master nearest him. 
 " You can do no good you '11 only make it 
 worse," the usher added, in a kindly whisper. 
 
 But poor little Shrimp Jiad held out his hand, 
 and was howling under the savage cut he had 
 got from Grisly 's cane. 
 
 " Hold your hand out again," growled Grisly,
 
 166 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 and Shrimp, fearing both to obey and to disobey, 
 was dodging his poor little rawly-puffed, bleeding 
 palm backwards and forwards, when Jolly Jim 
 rushed in to the rescue. 
 
 " Mr. Buntingford," he said, " I can't make out 
 why you don't like me, but if you want to take 
 it out of me, take it out of me! and not of a poor 
 sick little chap like that, you coward !" 
 
 As he spoke, Grisly cut at him. Jolly Jim 
 was not as patient as his words might have 
 seemed to promise, when he felt the cane. He 
 rushed at Grisly, and for a minute or two there 
 was a rough-and-tumble fight. Grisly got Jim 
 down, and lashed, him like a slave-driver, but we 
 had the satisfaction of seeing that previously 
 Grisly's face had received very undignified da- 
 mage. It had all happened so suddenly that 
 there had not been time for any one to interfere 
 on the one side or the other. The under-masters, 
 of course, were scandalized at such a flagrant 
 breach of discipline, and glanced anxiously at
 
 JOLLY JIM, !6 7 
 
 the forms that were heaving like waves tossing 
 themselves up into a storm ; and yet they did 
 not look at all vexed to see Grisly trembling 
 like a leaf, as pale as a sheet, and dabbing his 
 sodden-red pocket-handkerchief on his still-pour- 
 ing nose. 
 
 " Mr. Valpy," he said, as soon as he could gasp 
 out any words, to the head usher, " take my desk 
 till I come back. Mr. Scott-Liddell," to the se- 
 cond usher, " take Crisp to the Green Room, and 
 lock him in until he is expelled." 
 
 " What 's the odds so long as you 're happy ? " 
 said Jolly Jim, as he followed half-sympathetic, 
 half-nervous Mr. Scott-Liddell, meanwhile glanc- 
 ing with great satisfaction at the shirt-front of 
 his castigator, which seemed to be suffering 
 from a severe attack of measles. 
 
 "Don't be afraid, Shrimp," shouted Jim, as 
 he went out at the swing-door. " He won't hit 
 you again for nothing." 
 
 If Shrimp had been hit again for something,
 
 168 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 he would have found plenty of champions when 
 Grisly came back in a clean shirt and swollen 
 nose. But Shrimp was not hit for anything. 
 Grisly tried hard to look as if nothing had hap- 
 pened. Not succeeding, he let us out of school 
 about half an hour before our time. 
 
 The key of the Green Room was duly turned 
 on Jolly Jim, still repeating his favourite for- 
 mula ; but it was soon must I say unduly ? 
 turned again by the housekeeper. Jolly Jim 
 started on foot for Dulchester, and thence pre- 
 maturely took coach for home. We had no 
 breaking-up party that half. As soon as the 
 examination was over, Grisly vanished with his 
 beastly problem-papers, and we saw him no 
 more. Next half brought back our dear old 
 Doctor; and it also brought back Jolly Jim. 
 Of course the Doctor lectured him, but, as Jolly 
 Jim observed, "What's the odds, Shrimp, so 
 long as you 're happy ?"
 
 XI. 
 
 TRUANT JACK. 
 
 ALL the time I was at Axleford not more 
 than two boys, I think, ran away from 
 school. One of these runaways was little Jack 
 Sprat, as we used to call him a nice little fellow, 
 but he could not bear anything like confinement, 
 and he was mad to go to sea. 
 
 Jack's notion was that all sailors were jolly 
 fellows, who led very jolly lives. They might 
 have dangers to encounter, but if they were 
 wrecked, they were almost sure to get back to 
 England somehow, or, if they didn't, to have 
 beautiful desert islands waiting for them, which 
 was even better. And then their life was so un-
 
 170 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 like school so free and easy. There were such 
 cJwnces in it, too. You might begin as cabin-boy 
 in a merchantman (hadn't Captain Cook, and 
 Sir Cloudesly Shovel, and ever so many of the 
 famous fellows, been cabin-boys either in the 
 merchant service or the navy ?), but then you 
 might be the first of a crew of twenty gallant 
 British tars to board a pirate, and haul down the 
 black flag with its death's head and cross-bones, 
 the said pirate being manned by three hundred 
 bearded ruffians, black, brown, and renegade- 
 white, and carrying thirty long brass guns, which 
 your ship had fought for five hours, muzzle to 
 muzzle, with a rusty little bit of an iron cannon, 
 suddenly remembered and dragged out from 
 under the long-boat ; and then, before you could 
 say "Jack Robinson," you might find yourself 
 cadet, midshipman, first lieutenant, captain 
 of a dashing frigate, sink or capture two French 
 first-rates and half a dozen corvettes in single 
 combat, and take no end of American clippers.
 
 TRUANT JACK. 17 x 
 
 How the Portsmouth bells would ring when it 
 was known that the "'flying, fighting Arethusa" 
 had anchored at Spithead with a kite-tail of fresh 
 prizes under her stern ! The mayor and corpo- 
 ration would come down to welcome her heroic 
 young captain, when he landed, for the first time 
 during his brief but eventful life at sea, upon his 
 native soil. Mamma would not be sorry then that 
 he had run away from school ; and wouldn't " the 
 girls" sisters, and cousins, and all the rest of 
 them that you used to lark with under the mis- 
 tletoe envy the one that had hold of your sound 
 arm (one arm, of course, would be in a sling, but 
 sure to get quite well the week after next), when 
 you walked to church the first Sunday after you 
 got home, in your cocked hat, and blue coat, and 
 white trousers, and with your gold epaulettes, 
 and sword (hacked like a saw), and a baker's 
 dozen of medals on ? 
 
 Jack was a great chum of mine, and he gravely 
 assured me that having to sit still in a school-
 
 172 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 room made the blood rush to his head. Accord- 
 ingly, to secure liberty, the sagacious Jack made 
 up his mind to turn cabin-boy. 
 
 He told me all his adventures afterwards, and 
 so I can tell them to you just as if I had run 
 away with him. 
 
 The eventful morning came at length, and Jack 
 woke early in the autumn moonlight. All the 
 other fellows in the long dormitory were sound 
 asleep. He felt rather scared, but as he was, he 
 said his prayers before he crept out of the room. 
 Perhaps he hurried them over rather, and per- 
 haps he did not feel quite sure that boys who 
 were running away had any business to say 
 prayers ; but still he did say them, partly from 
 habit, and partly because he felt that people who 
 were going to sea could not make sure for a 
 moment what would happen to them. Then he 
 went out of the room on tiptoe, carrying the 
 shoes which he had smuggled up to bed the night 
 before, instead of pushing them into his pigeon-
 
 TRUANT JACK. 173 
 
 hole in the shoe-rack to be cleaned; and stole 
 almost as silently as a shadow down the stairs. 
 Boards would creak, though, when he was pass- 
 ing the bed-room doors he dreaded most; and 
 he had to make a rush past the tall old clock on 
 the last landing. " Tick-tick, tick-tick," it said ; 
 "/'m awake I 've been awake all night, /know 
 what 's going on, if every one else is asleep." 
 
 In the hall Jack put on his shoes, and prepared 
 to tackle the front door. There were two bolts 
 to shoot back, and a bar to take down, and a chain 
 to unsnack, and then a huge key to turn. Jack 
 almost tumbled off the tottering scaffolding of 
 hall-chairs, &c. he constructed to reach the top 
 bolt ; but all the obstacles except the lock were 
 overcome at last. The key for a time would 
 only give a grating creak that made Jack shiver 
 it obstinately refused to turn. With a wrench 
 that almost put his wrists out of joint, Jack twisted 
 it round. A moment afterwards he had lifted 
 the latch, and was running down to the great
 
 174 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD, 
 
 gates, leaping over the shadows of the trees that 
 stretched out gaunt black arms, as if they wanted 
 to trip him up or catch him by the ankle. Jack 
 had expected that he would have to clamber over 
 the great gates, but hooray ! the little door in 
 one of them had been left unlocked, and was idly 
 swinging backwards and forwards in the breeze. 
 Jack had time to turn round and shake his fist 
 at the rusty old bell that wouldn't ring him up 
 to work before breakfast ; and then he plunged 
 into the outside moonlight, and felt free, although 
 he still ran on. 
 
 Jack did not go into Dulchester, but struck 
 across country into the London road. For some 
 time he had been saving up his pocket-money, 
 and selling off his property, in a way that seemed 
 very mysterious to me, as I did not know the 
 reason. Perhaps he had just about money enough 
 to pay his fare to London by coach, but he did 
 not venture to ask any of the coachmen who 
 passed him to take him, thinking that when they
 
 TRUANT JACK. . 175 
 
 got him to London they would lock him up, and 
 then bring him back next day, bound hand and 
 foot, to Axleford. Part of the way to London 
 he walked, and part he rode in farmers' waggons 
 and carriers' carts, and fish-machines. Some- 
 times he had to stand pots of beer in return for 
 his rides. Whilst he was tramping, a brickdust- 
 faced young woman-tramp who met him collared 
 him, and helped herself to a considerable per- 
 centage of his cash, laughing most disrespectfully 
 when she found the table-knife which Jack had 
 slipped up his jacket-sleeve dagger-wise for 
 his protection against robbers, and helping her- 
 self to that, too. He was obliged to buy some- 
 thing to eat and drink upon the road, and, ac- 
 cordingly, had very little left in his pocket when 
 he was put down in Mile End early in the morn- 
 ing after that on which he had left Axleford. Jack 
 thought, however, that all he had to do was to 
 get to " the Docks," but it was a good while be- 
 fore he could find his way to the Docks. When
 
 1 76 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 he asked his way to them, people said, " What 
 docks, you young silly ? " and others told him to 
 go to such-a-street, and turn down such-another- 
 street, and anybody would tell him there; but 
 Jack didn't know where such-a-street and such- 
 another-street were, any more than he knew 
 where the Docks were. 
 
 When he reached Ratcliff Highway at last, 
 and threaded his way through the throng of 
 greasy, ragged, unshaven labourers still waiting 
 to be hired outside the gates, the London Docks 
 were in full swing of business. The bustle pleased 
 Jack at first. Men were hewing sugar-hogsheads 
 open with great axes, white coopers were ham- 
 mering away at casks, blue custom-house officers 
 were gauging casks, men were trundling casks, 
 casks in thousands stood along the quays. Dan- 
 gling from top floors of the tall warehouses, and 
 over the mine-like holds of the ships, boxes, bar- 
 rels, crates, bales, hogsheads, and huge bundles 
 of hides and sheepskins, and skeins of jangling
 
 TRUANT JACK. 177 
 
 iron bars, were everywhere gomg up or down. 
 Tea-chests were being shot into lighters, like 
 boys sliding down a hill. There was a smell, too, 
 here of sugar, there of tobacco, and yonder of 
 vinegar, or drugs, or brandy and everywhere of 
 tar that somehow sharpened Jack's desire to be 
 a sailor. But he soon felt half disappointed ; 
 nobody in the Docks looked jolly. The men 
 who were crying "Heave heave heave alto- 
 gether ! " as they strained at the winches, looked 
 far more like depressed dustmen than dashing 
 mariners. Even the real sailors had nothing 
 rollicking about them. They hadn't broad turn- 
 over collars to their shirts, low-waisted breeches, 
 and long-quartered pumps. Some of them had 
 their trousers braced up almost to their armpits, 
 and worse still instead of hailing him with a 
 "What cheer, messmate?" some of them gave 
 Jack a shove, and swore at him, if he happened 
 to stumble against them, as he caught his foot in 
 
 the great iron mooring-rings, or groped his way 
 
 12
 
 178 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 under and over the gangways, chains, and haw- 
 sers that everywhere blocked the path. Some of 
 the mates, to be sure, had gilt bands round their 
 caps, and gilt buttons on their blue coats, but the 
 greasy, white-seamed uniforms had a very shabby- 
 genteel look, and Jack did not like to see sailors 
 quill-driving at the little tables at which the car- 
 goes were being checked off. 
 
 However, there were the ships, at any rate, 
 some of them with bunting flying, or a loose sail 
 bellying out, or sailors' clothes hung up to dry 
 real big ships from all parts of the world. When 
 Jack thought of the pure sea to which they 
 were accustomed, he wondered that they did not 
 fidget in the stagnant, muddy-green dock-water. 
 But some of the ships did not smell very sweet ; 
 unpleasant whiffs came from them of bilge-water, 
 perspiring sheepskins, and putrid horns and hides. 
 
 " But I needn't go in a ship that carries nasty 
 things like those," thought Jack ; " I Ve plenty 
 to pick from."
 
 TRUANT JACK. 179 
 
 He made up his mind, for one thing, that he 
 wouldn't go in a steamer, or in a blistered, rusty, 
 old-fashioned sailing tub, with a bow as broad as 
 its stern, and its grey, ragged rigging all in a 
 tangle. At last he found a craft just to his taste, 
 with a clipper bow, and raking masts, and gilt 
 stars on the catheads, and bright brass belaying 
 pins, and deck as white as milk, and ropes coiled 
 down on it like Catherine- wheels. A placard lashed 
 on to her shrouds announced that she was bound 
 for Hong Kong, and " the East " was just where 
 Jack wanted to go to. So he went up to some 
 men who were swinging on a stage, painting the 
 clipper's sides, and said, as knowingly as he could, 
 
 " Can you tell me if this ship is in want of a 
 hand ? " 
 
 " Can't say, sir," answered one of the men with 
 a grin ; " better ask the mate. There he stands 
 by the gangway." 
 
 " If you please, sir, I want to go to sea," said 
 Jack to the mate, very respectfully. 
 
 12- 2
 
 i8o THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 " Do you ? Go back home, you little fool." 
 
 Ship after ship he tried with no better success, 
 and what that mate said was quite polite com- 
 pared with the answers Jack got from some of 
 the mates and captains. Where there were men 
 on board, too, they made fun of him ; told him 
 that they had got a monkey already, and dis- 
 agreeable things of that kind ; and one sulky old 
 black cook dabbed a dirty dishclout into his face, 
 and threatened to send a bucket of water over 
 him, if he didn't make tracks tarnation slick out 
 of his galley. Jack did not try an American ship 
 again after that. 
 
 Presently, however, a red-faced man came reel- 
 ing down to a boat that was waiting to pull him 
 to a ship which was being warped out of dock. 
 He overheard Jack speaking to a captain, and 
 sang out, 
 
 " Want to go to sea, eh ? Come along wi' me ; 
 I want a boy, an' one 's as good as another." 
 
 Jack did not much like the look of the man,
 
 TRUANT JACK. 
 
 but he was ashamed to hold back. He scrambled 
 down into the boat, and presently was scrambling 
 up the side of the Onyx, 960 tons, bound for Port 
 Natal. The Onyx was not A I, and she didn't 
 carry " a cow and an experienced surgeon." As 
 soon as the captain got on board, he tumbled 
 into his cabin to sleep off his drink. Jack enjoyed 
 the bustle of the river as they were being towed 
 down to Gravesend, but felt rather uncomfortable 
 because no one gave him anything to do. 
 
 "If you please, sir, I Ve come on board to 
 work," he said to the second mate. 
 
 " Oh, have you ? Where did you sign articles ? 
 I thought you was the skipper's kid. Don't dis- 
 tress yourself, lie '11 find you plenty to do; we've 
 none too many hands on board. Make yourself 
 happy whilst you can ; it's a poor soul that never 
 rejoices." 
 
 This was the nearest approach to his idea of 
 sailors' talk which Jack had heard, and his heart 
 warmed accordingly to Mr. Croggan. When the
 
 1 82 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 Onyx brought up for the night at Gravesend, he 
 asked Mr. Croggan where he was to turn in 
 Jack was just going to say " go to bed," but re- 
 membered the proper phrase in time. 
 
 " Why, where did you put your chest ? " asked 
 Mr. Croggan. And when he learnt how Jack had 
 come to sea, he gave a long whistle, and said, 
 "You poor little devil; why, what a born 
 idiot you must be ! " 
 
 Jack slept that night on the floor of the deck- 
 house, which the second mate and the carpenter 
 shared, and thought himself very lucky to get 
 such shelter, for the rain thumped down on the 
 roof like marbles. The next morning the Onyx 
 took her pilot, weighed anchor, and beat out to 
 sea. Captain Mitchell came on deck in the vile 
 temper which was " his usual," as the Scotch say, 
 unless when stupefied by drink. 
 
 " Why didn't you bring me my coffee ? " he 
 growled to Jack, and then he boxed Jack's ears 
 with his clenched fists. The first mate, Mr.
 
 TRUANJ JACK. 183 
 
 Munnens, was not much better tempered than 
 the skipper. The carpenter and two or three of 
 the foremast-men were hearty fellows, but the 
 rest of the crew were blackguards. 
 
 Off Margate the pilot insisted on bringing up, 
 although the skipper wanted to crack on. When 
 Jack looked at the Margate lamps twinkling 
 through the rushing rain, and over the wild black 
 waters, he almost wished himself back at Axle- 
 ford. How he longed to be at /tome ! The watch 
 were clustered round the galley, out of which 
 the howling wind blew a long line of red sparks ; 
 the rest of the men were under cover in the fore- 
 castle ; Mr. Croggan, swathed in oilskins, was 
 tramping to and fro on the poop ; but Jack, wet 
 to the skin, was shivering, waiting for orders, out- 
 side the door of the cabin, in which the skipper, 
 and the first mate, and the pilot were taking their 
 grog. Every now and then a damp sheep dan- 
 gling on the gallows came thump against Jack's 
 face, and loneliness had so taken the pluck out
 
 J 84 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 of him, that he felt half inclined to cry. There 
 was nothing dignified in his distresses. He had 
 found out that he was nobody on board ; that if 
 he had a moment to spare from the captain's 
 work, he was at the beck and call of everybody, 
 and would be expected to do all the dirtiest jobs. 
 As he thought of what he had already done, he 
 grew sick again; and because he was hanging 
 over the side, instead of waiting to receive the 
 captain's orders to fetch some more hot water 
 from the galley, he got another hiding. Poor 
 Jack did not feel much like the gallant captain 
 of the "flying, fighting Arethusa" when he 
 crept into the dog-kennel of a bunk that had 
 been assigned him, together with a few rough 
 slop-clothes that had been thrown at his head 
 as a bare bone might be pitched to a mangy, 
 stray, mongrel cur. The next morning the cable 
 parted, the remnant fragment thumping against 
 the bows with a dull thud, distinguishable even 
 in the roaring of the storm. The ship swung
 
 TRUANT JACK. 185 
 
 round and floundered broadside towards the land. 
 Sea-sick Jack almost hoped that she might drive 
 ashore. Sea-sick as he was, he could not help 
 seeing and wondering at the same hope in the 
 half-drunken skipper's eyes. But the pilot, and 
 the mates, and the men rushed forward like race- 
 horses ; another cable was paid out, and the Onyx 
 was brought up in water just deep enough to float 
 her. 
 
 " What are you skulking for there, you young 
 lubber?" was Captain Mitchell's Te Dcunt, and 
 Jack received his thank-offering in a rope's-end- 
 ing. The skipper swore fiercely at the luggers 
 that swooped down on and skimmed round the 
 Onyx like a flock of dark-winged sea-birds ; but 
 he was obliged to go ashore in one of them to 
 buy a new anchor and cable ; and when the an- 
 chor had been fished, the skipper relieved his 
 feelings by giving Jack a drubbing, for which he 
 did not take the trouble to invent a reason. 
 
 " Run up and shake out the main-royal, you
 
 1 86 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 lazy young whelp !" the skipper bellowed to Jack 
 in the fair weather that followed the foul, as the 
 Onyx stood down Channel. Jack, whose sea- 
 sickness had passed, was delighted at the chance 
 of getting something sailor-like to do, but he had 
 the vaguest idea of where and what the main- 
 royal was ; and because he hesitated, the skipper 
 was going to lick him again. The pilot, however, 
 interposed, and gave Jack a dim notion of what 
 he was expected to do. He did not run up the 
 rigging very nimbly especially when he had no 
 rattlins to help him ; he turned giddy every now 
 and then, and clutched the shrouds as if he could 
 not " run " or " shin " up another foot : he fumbled 
 sadly with the unfamiliar sail fancying every 
 moment that he was going to be shaken off the 
 yard like a rotten pear; but still, as the pilot 
 said, when Jack came down (beginning at last 
 to recover his old opinion of his special aptitude 
 for a sailor's life), his performance was " very fair 
 for a beginning." Jack had expected louder laud
 
 TRUANT JACK. 187 
 
 than that ; he had thought that even the skipper 
 would clap him on the back. The skipper did 
 clap him on the back in a very unpleasant man- 
 ner the next time he ran foul of Jack when the 
 pilot was not by. 
 
 The pilot was a very trifling check on the skip- 
 per's bad temper, but still Jack looked ruefully 
 on the boat that carried the pilot ashore. 
 
 When Eddystone's star had faded from the sky, 
 Jack began to think that he had been brought on 
 board the Onyx simply to be tormented. With 
 the rowdy portion of the crew, Jack was sharp 
 enough to see, the skipper wanted to curry favour. 
 The first mate, too, he seemed to want to win 
 over and to be puzzled because Mr. Munnens 
 did not respond more cordially to his advances. 
 Mr. Croggan and the carpenter he snubbed, and 
 the jolly fellows in the forecastle, who were far 
 and away the best seamen in it, he was so fond 
 of " bully-ragging," that even Mr. Munnens, well 
 as he liked to hear any one blown up, when he
 
 1 88 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 had not the chance of blowing anybody up him- 
 self, used to put in his oar on the other side, 
 simply out of the sympathy which every good 
 seaman feels with another good seaman when his 
 seamanship is unjustly impugned. 
 
 You must not suppose that Jack was always 
 miserable ; no boy can be, however badly he is 
 treated. Jack soon got his sea-legs, and grew 
 proud of being able to go aloft without feeling 
 at all funky. 
 
 When Mr. Croggan, as was often the case, 
 had the sole command during the captain's 
 watch, and the drunken captain was snoring 
 in his berth, Jack was safe. Mr. Croggan 
 was as kind to him as he could be, and the good 
 fellows, who happened to be all in the captain's 
 watch, wouldn't let the other men treat Jack as 
 a football. Besides, the savagest people cannot 
 keep on being savage for ever. They will let you 
 alone sometimes, because they cannot get any 
 fun out of plaguing you especially if they see
 
 TRUANT JACK. 189 
 
 that you are beginning not to mind and that 
 was how Jack began to feel after a bit. 
 
 And then he saw Madeira a silver mist rising 
 out of a golden sea ; and porpoises were har- 
 pooned, and dolphins grained, and bonito hooked, 
 and flapping sharks hauled on board with a lump 
 of pork down their horrid horseshoe mouths, and 
 flying-fish fell on deck ; and Jack managed to 
 get a taste of them all ; and as he ate, he thought 
 what a much more heroic personage he was (though 
 he was kicked about like a dog) than the tame- 
 spirited stay-at-homes, who were being rung in to 
 dinner at Axleford. 
 
 Jack did not much relish crossing the Line, 
 however. He was the only person on board the 
 Onyx who had not crossed it before, and the 
 savage fellows made up for their lack of other 
 fun by "taking it out of" Jack extensively, and 
 even the jolly fellows thought that he was fair 
 game then. Jack was lathered with unmention- 
 able soap, the huge shaving-brush was dabbed
 
 igo THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 into his mouth, the skin was rasped off his 
 cheeks and chin with a jagged bit of rusty 
 iron hoop, and then up flew his heels, and he 
 was floundering in a tub of filthy water. And 
 when he had scrambled out, in spite of the many 
 hands that tried to keep his head under, and was 
 gasping for breath as if he must shake to pieces, 
 bucketful after bucketful of water was shot into 
 his face to drive the breath out of him again. 
 
 But Jack recovered his breath, and the lum- 
 bering, leaky old Onyx waddled on with him 
 into the South Atlantic. He saw the Southern 
 Cross and the Magellan Clouds, and whales send- 
 ing up silvery jets, and routing about in the waves 
 like monstrously magnified pigs in a monstrously 
 magnified strawyard. He pitched biscuit to the 
 huge grey and white albatrosses when they lei- 
 surely folded their wide double-jointed wings in 
 a calm, and swam up to the side like tame ducks. 
 
 But dirty weather soon set in, and the pump- 
 ing which had been throughout the voyage a
 
 TRUANT JACK I 9 r 
 
 cause of grumbling became more fagging than 
 ever; as Jack, whose hands were skinned by 
 the ropes and his back stiff with the bending, 
 had good reason to know. The men no longer 
 chanted 
 
 "They say, old man, your horse will die 
 They say so and they think so" 
 
 as the beam was jerked up and down. Mutinous 
 growls were the chorus now. The way the skip- 
 per behaved in bad weather puzzled the men. 
 He would scarcely take a stitch of canvas off 
 the ship when she was lying over so that her 
 yards nearly dipped into the water. 
 
 " It 's my belief," Jack heard one of his friends 
 say to another, " that the old man 's either mad, 
 or else he 's bribed to sink the ship, and gets so 
 drunk he forgets he'll go down in her. If Mr. 
 Munnens would put the skipper in irons, I'd 
 stand by him." 
 
 The rowdies, however although they did 
 grumble at the pumping were on the skipper's
 
 192 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 side. He raved at them, too, sometimes, but he 
 maintained no discipline. He made very little 
 fuss even when the mate told him that the cargo 
 had been broached, and a barrelful of spirit- 
 bottles stolen. 
 
 The skipper was carrying on as usual one day, 
 although black, ragged clouds, like dusty cob- 
 webs, were fast mounting from all sides of the 
 horizon. The distant sea was bristled by the 
 hurricane that was rushing towards the ship. 
 
 As Mr. Croggan shouted, " Stand by the royal 
 halyards ! " the royals flew in rags from the bolt- 
 ropes, and the royal masts snapped like twigs. 
 The skipper, drunk as usual, came reeling from 
 his cabin, but Mr. Munnens rushed before him. 
 
 " All hands on deck ! " the mate bellowed, and 
 his watch came tumbling up half drunk. Down 
 came the hail in lumps like jagged pebbles. 
 Down, too, through the night-black sky shot a 
 great lump of lightning, and sank like a seething 
 mass of molten metal into the black sea. Blue
 
 TRUANT JACK. 193 
 
 and pink and yellow zigzags constantly scarred 
 the sky, and peal after peal came the awful, over- 
 lapping thunder. Tacks and sheets doubled like 
 whip-lashes ; the fiercely flapping canvas made 
 a thunder of its own ; the thick mainyard was 
 snapped in the slings as you might break a lath 
 across your knee. The Onyx lay over so that 
 it seemed impossible she could ever come up 
 again. When Jack went up the weather-rigging 
 tauter than harp-strings behind two of his 
 old friends, to give a hand in shortening sail, his 
 heart was in his mouth ; and though he expected 
 to be whirled off like a withered leaf, yet he had 
 just time for one thought, that stabbed him like 
 a knife, about his mother and his sisters from 
 whom he had run away. 
 
 But the Onyx did right herself when they got 
 the canvas off her, and was still afloat next mora-> 
 ing, when the sky was bright again, and the zebra- 
 striped Cape pigeons were flitting blithely over 
 the subsiding sea. Masses of seaweed, too, were 
 
 13
 
 194 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 floating on the waves. The captain, however, 
 obstinately refused to follow the mate's advice 
 to bear up for Table Bay, and ordered out the 
 boats. 
 
 " You 're robbing your owners, if you desert 
 her, Captain Mitchell," said Mr. Munnens. " I '11 
 stake my life we can take her into Cape Town." 
 
 "Obey orders, if you break owners, sir," growled 
 the skipper. 
 
 " Obey orders, and break underwriters, Captain 
 Mitchell that's it, isn't it ?" answered the mate. 
 " I won't leave her while she '11 float who '11 
 stay with me ? " 
 
 Most of the men went over the side with the 
 captain, but Mr. Croggan, and the carpenter, and 
 Jack, and three or four of the men, stopped with 
 Mr. Munnens ; and after a very anxious day, 
 Table Mountain stood up clearly dark against 
 the sky, and the Onyx floundered past Robben 
 Island, and let go her anchor in Table Bay. 
 
 The underwriters made a handsome present to
 
 TRUANT JACK. 195 
 
 the mates and the men who had stuck to the 
 Onyx, when they got to hear of what had hap- 
 pened, since she had been insured shamefully 
 above her value. Perhaps the underwriters might 
 have had something unpleasant to say to Captain 
 Mitchell ; but he and the men who went with 
 him never turned up again. 
 
 A very different skipper from Captain Mitchell 
 took Jack home out of charity ; but though he 
 had been kindly treated, Jack respectfully de- 
 clined the captain's offer to take him as an ap- 
 prentice when they got back to England. A 
 brown, shabby little urchin was Jack when he 
 reached home. He was considerably ashamed 
 of himself as well as his shabbiness, when his 
 mother and sisters rushed out to meet him ; but 
 they seemed so proud of his brownness that Jack 
 grew proud of it too. 
 
 He soon began to brag of his adventures at 
 home, and he went on bragging about them 
 
 when the Doctor allowed him to come back to 
 
 13 2
 
 196 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 Axleford ; but although he always gave himself 
 great airs when nautical matters were discussed 
 amongst us, on account of his extensive maritime 
 experience, he had given up talking about being 
 a sailor. His voyage to the Cape had quite cured 
 him of his tendency to determination of blood to 
 the head in school-time.
 
 XII. 
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 
 
 STEPHEN MONCKTON we called the 
 Philosopher, because he was always " try- 
 ing experiments" of one kind or another. He 
 had views of his own on education, and therefore 
 did not pay much attention to his " regular work." 
 The Axleford system of instruction was behind 
 the age, he said which was an ingenious excuse 
 for shirking his lessons. When he ought to have 
 been learning his Latin and Greek, very often he 
 was furtively reading Parkes's Chemical Catechism 
 or Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, or something of 
 that kind, under the lid of his locker. He seldom 
 played, generally spending the intervals between
 
 198 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 school-hours in experimenting which seemed to 
 consist chiefly in making bad smells. When his 
 cash and chemicals ran low, and he had nothing 
 but the saltcellars and his unfailing bottle of sul- 
 phuric acid to fall back upon, he would pass a 
 whole half-holiday in dropping the acid on the 
 salt. He seemed to like the white suffocating 
 fumes that steamed up from his saucers. The 
 rest of us didn't like them, and were compelled 
 occasionally to Lynch the Philosopher. Our 
 ignorant brutality moved him to indignation and 
 contemptuous pity. 
 
 " You dolts ! " he would shout, as we pitched 
 his saucers out of window, " what you call a stink 
 is muriatic acid ! " 
 
 But because he could give it that fine name, 
 it was not any pleasanter to breathe, you see, 
 although the Philosopher appeared to think so. 
 Stephen was not a nice fellow to sit next to at 
 meal-times. He had a taste for physiology as 
 well as chemistry, and smelt like a druggist's
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 199 
 
 shop with a rat-catcher's kitchen behind it. He 
 was a long, lean, pale-faced boy, who thought it 
 " unscientific " to use bear's-grease or to brush his 
 hair ; his finger-nails and fingers were curiously 
 dyed with many unfragrant colours; and his 
 jacket-sleeves and trouser-legs were curiously 
 dappled with rotten little circles caused by the 
 dropping of acids. 
 
 On the whole, however, Stephen was not un- 
 popular. He laboured hard in many ways to im- 
 prove our minds, and, at any rate, often succeeded 
 in amusing us. It was Stephen who started the 
 Axleford Spectator. He was its sole proprietor, 
 publisher, editor, reporter, compositor, printer's 
 devil, reader, machineman, manager, clerk, and 
 advertisement collector. He wrote all the cor- 
 respondents' letters likewise. It took about a 
 month to set up and print the Spectator. The 
 press was of the kind still to be seen in toy-shops, 
 and when an inch had been set up the type was 
 exhausted, and had to be struck off, and distri-
 
 200 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 buted, in order that another inch might be 
 printed. The types were not very clearly cut, to 
 begin with ; they would not stand upright, how- 
 ever Stephen might try to make them ; and he 
 was not very expert at sorting his " pie." Under 
 these circumstances the Spectator could scarcely 
 be considered a triumph of typography. Its inch 
 strata dipped away from one another, and ran 
 into one another, and some of its paragraphs 
 looked far more like cheap dominoes than read- 
 ing matter. Nevertheless, the Spectator was un- 
 questionably cheap. A generation before the 
 EcJio came out, Stephen Monckton had published 
 a halfpenny paper ! So far as circulation went, 
 the Spectator was a great success. Everybody in 
 any way connected with the school took in its 
 organ. Advertisements also poured in freely, 
 payment being received in marbles and other 
 " kind " when cash disbursements would have 
 been inconvenient. But Stephen and his appli- 
 ances caved in under the Herculean task he had
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 201 
 
 taken in hand. The Spectator expired when only 
 two copies and seven-eighths of the third had 
 appeared. Even the last paragraph of that in- 
 complete No. 3 had to be written. Thus it ran : 
 
 " THE PUBLISHER'S APOLOGY. All my ca- 
 pitals are clogged up my small a's and i's have 
 gone a-missing my press-handle is broken I 
 know not what to do. PLUTARCH." 
 
 I possess a perfect file of the Axleford Spec- 
 tator. Carefully turning over its pages, which 
 look now very much like dusters partially con- 
 verted into tinder, I make out with difficulty, 
 amongst the advertisements, the following : 
 41 long bobus ix an Ass ;" " Stubbs miner will 
 give grimes tho He is so proud, of his runnind- 
 up to the 3rd elm &c beat him then before he 
 gets to the great Gates?" "Their "ill be this 
 
 cveningj^a 1 y c JJall members are 
 
 redpectfulty requested to qe prcxcutj 
 
 I cannot read the " leaders " now ; but I re- 
 member their subjects, and that they did not in-
 
 202 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 terest us much. The first was on Oxygen, the 
 second on Hydrogen, and the third on Nitrogen. 
 As Stephen adopted the catechetical mode of 
 communicating information employed by his 
 scientific text-books before mentioned, and since 
 he merely echoed what he found there, in language 
 as nearly identical as condensation and an ambi- 
 tion to show originality would permit, he might, 
 perhaps, have given us fuller, more accurate, and 
 far more legible scientific lore by merely referring 
 to his authorities. 
 
 Stephen's correspondence was a good deal 
 spicier than his leaders. He wrote, as I have 
 said, all the letters, and yet he did not "hold 
 himself responsible for the opinions of his cor- 
 respondents"! In his first number he published 
 a letter from "A Subscriber from the Beginning," 
 highly laudatory of "your ably conducted jour- 
 nal." The correspondence in the Spectator was 
 really very interesting. Although Stephen chiefly 
 occupied his leisure in making nasty smells, he
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 203 
 
 had a knack of writing about the things we cared 
 about, just as if he cared about them. The second 
 number of the Spectator contained a very spirited 
 (though now utterly illegible) controversy be- 
 tween " Publicola " and " Miles's Boy" on a hotly 
 contested game at "little ring." It is so long 
 since I played at marbles that I can pass no 
 opinion on the intrinsic merits of the dispute. 
 The moot point was either the right to, or the 
 way in which to, drop a marble, with one eye 
 closed, on a " taw " or " commoner " I forget 
 which that had happened to stop in its rolling 
 just on the ring. Stephen was quite witty on 
 both sides of this controversy. He talked about 
 the ring of Saturn and the one-eyed Polyphemus. 
 He evolved from the depths of his consciousness 
 an imaginary rival paper, which "Publicola" 
 caustically characterized as " your co-trumpery," 
 because it was supposed to advocate the view of 
 " Miles's Boy;" " Miles's Boy" still more caustic- 
 ally replying, " If the Axleford Examiner is your
 
 2C4 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 co-trumpery, Sir, you, Sir, must be trumpery; but 
 I scorn to stoop to ribald punning;" the editor 
 adding gravely, " This correspondence must now 
 cease both 'Publicola' and 'Miles's Boy' have 
 lost their tempers." In order that the public 
 might not lose a single point, Stephen, as I have 
 intimated, published the whole of this corre- 
 spondence, together with the editorial note, in 
 one impression. 
 
 The Spectator was dated on the ist of the 
 month ; it came out about the 3Oth. Stephen 
 could not afford to delete anything that had once 
 been printed, and yet he wanted to preserve a 
 freshness of tone. All his news was " recent " 
 something that happened " yesterday," " this 
 morning," or, "whilst we are going to (or through) 
 the press." In a chronological point of view, 
 therefore, the Spectator was a confusing infor- 
 mant ; but Scientific Stephen proudly boasted 
 that it focused the events of the month. The 
 only attempt at harmonizing his paragraphs
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 205 
 
 which he made was when one would otherwise 
 have flatly contradicted another just above it. 
 In that case he would preface the lower paragraph 
 with something of this kind : 
 
 " Since the above was set up, stating that so- 
 and-so happened, we have been informed that 
 so-and-so did not happen. We subjoin more 
 accurate particulars." 
 
 After all, our boys' paper only did, in one im- 
 pression, what men's papers of to-day do to their 
 own impressions of yesterday ; and to state what 
 is false, and retract it in the same number of a 
 newspaper, everybody must acknowledge, is more 
 honest than to sell a fib to-day, and then wait 
 until to-morrow and sell the contradiction. 
 
 Altogether, the Axleford Spectator would have 
 been a great success, we said, if Stephen had only 
 had plant and pluck enough to make it succeed. 
 
 We were very indignant when he threw it up ; 
 but none of us offered to help him. Capital might, 
 no doubt, have been subscribed to subsidize the
 
 206 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 paper ; but nobody offered to give up play in 
 order to give Stephen literary and mechanical 
 aid in bringing out his venture. 
 
 We were very proud to hear that the rector 
 had said that the Spectator " really reflects great 
 credit on your boys, Doctor;" but, though we 
 liked credit that nobody but Stephen had earned, 
 we were too intellectually lazy, and too physically 
 active, to take the trouble to earn for ourselves 
 honest credit as journalists. 
 
 Next half, the indomitable Stephen started 
 the "Axleford Literary and Scientific Institu- 
 tion." The "literary" part of the business he 
 did not care for much, and he only allowed it to 
 come first in the title of his institution as a sop 
 to the public opinion of the school. The youngest 
 usher consented to deliver a literary lecture on 
 " Verbs ending in pi ; " our top-boy gave one on 
 " The Sublime and Beautiful ; " but the rest of 
 the course was purely scientific, and Stephen de- 
 livered the whole of it. He was, besides, the pre-
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 207 
 
 sident, secretary, treasurer, curator, and janitor 
 of the institution all of them honorary offices. 
 The subscriptions which he received could not 
 have half paid him for what he spent on speci- 
 mens and experiments. The Doctor let him 
 have the dining-hall for his lecture-room, and 
 before Stephen took his stand as lecturer behind 
 the cross-table at the top of the room, he col- 
 lected tickets at the door. He would not let 
 any one in without one, but since non-subscribers 
 could get them as easily as subscribers, the re- 
 venues of the institution were not plethorically 
 swollen by Stephen's scientific eloquence. 
 
 He opened the course with a scientific lecture, 
 attended by the Doctor and a troop of lady- 
 friends, all the under-masters, all the boys, old 
 Growler, Jim the knife-cleaner and shoeblack, 
 and fitfully, by the matron and the women-ser- 
 vants. The last-named rushed into the hall when 
 they heard a bang, and stayed till they heard 
 another, if Stephen's explanation of the last
 
 208 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD, 
 
 did not exhaust their patience. Stephen's sub' 
 ject was wide "The Advantages of an Acquaint- 
 ance with Science." So far as I remember the 
 lecture written in a small-hand copybook, in 
 characters which Stephen could not always de- 
 cipher the advantages of the said acquaintance 
 were illustrated as follows : Stephen, in spite 
 of the thick towel which he had wrapped round 
 the red cabbage pickle-bottle he called a "re- 
 ceiver," got his wrist cut by the broken glass 
 sent flying through his explosion of a mixture 
 of two gases in the pickle-bottle. There were 
 sundry other explosions, the particulars of which 
 I do not recollect. A mouse danced itself into 
 hysterics in a jar of oxygen gas, and then ought 
 to have been killed by being plunged into a jar 
 of carbonic acid gas; but the excited mouse 
 made prudent use of its excitement, and jumped 
 out of the carbonic acid, causing great commo- 
 tion amongst the ladies, as it scuttled along the 
 floor. A bladder balloon, supposed to be filled
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 209 
 
 with hydrogen gas, ought to have gone up to the 
 ceiling, but there was a hole in the bladder, and 
 so it would not go up. Candles were put out by 
 having apparently empty tumblers tilted over 
 them. This experiment did not always succeed ; 
 and when it did, the smoke of the candle was not 
 pleasant. Stephen's specialty was nasty smells, 
 and he made a good many of them, which I am 
 not scientific enough to characterize, that night. 
 His lecture was abruptly brought to a close by 
 one of these malodours. His pneumatic trough 
 was of his own construction, and whilst he 
 was making sulphuretted hydrogen, bubble after 
 bubble of it escaped into the air. The conse- 
 quence was a wild stampede from the lecture- 
 room ; but Stephen threw up the windows, and 
 stuck to his post. When the atmosphere was a 
 little purified, the Doctor and a few of Stephen's 
 audience not including the ladies came back 
 out of compassion to listen to the lecturer's pre- 
 cipitated peroration. I cannot be sure as to the 
 
 14
 
 210 TP1E BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 exact words ; but, so far as my memory serves, 
 it ran thus Stephen coughing, and then trying 
 to find his place again, after every half-dozen 
 words : 
 
 " Ladies and gentlemen We have thus seen 
 how in every department of life science ministers 
 to our wants and promotes our comfort. Feeble 
 as my attempts to prove these truths in words 
 may have been, the experiments I have performed 
 must have shown you, that if we hearken to the 
 voice of Nature, interpreted by science, they 
 prove themselves. I have now, ladies and gen- 
 tlemen, only to thank you for the patient atten- 
 tion with which you have listened to my humble 
 effort to demonstrate that, without a practical 
 acquaintance with science, life would be robbed 
 of all its charms." 
 
 The Doctor cried "hear, hear!" and proposed 
 a vote of thanks to the lecturer, which was se- 
 conded by the youngest usher ; both the pro- 
 poser and the seconder being compelled, like the
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 211 
 
 lecturer, to stop to cough every now and then. 
 The Doctor's friends, however, did not come to 
 any more of Stephen's lectures. The last on 
 " The Domestic Architecture of the Mole " was 
 attended, I think, by only three fellows besides 
 myself. Stephen had prepared elaborate dia- 
 grams of the internal structure of mole-hills, and 
 he had secured, at considerable expense, a live 
 mole from the Axleford mole-catcher. Every- 
 thing the lecturer said, and everything the mole 
 did not much that we could see, since he per- 
 formed his experiments in a washing-tub full of 
 earth we greeted with loud applause ; but four 
 people clapping their hands in a room that would 
 hold a couple of hundred can hardly be consi- 
 dered a stimulating audience. Stephen conscien- 
 tiously read his last lecture out to the last word ; 
 but the institution's first course of lectures was 
 its only one. 
 
 One bit of science, however, Stephen did suc- 
 ceed in popularizing in Axleford. He sent us 
 
 14 2
 
 212 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 electrotyping-mad. There was scarcely a fellow 
 who did not invest in jam-pots, zinc, copper wire, 
 and blue vitriol. We cut out the seal of every 
 letter we got (adhesive envelopes were not then 
 in fashion) ; we begged and borrowed seal im- 
 pressions right and left, and smudged ourselves 
 up to the eyebrows in blackleading them, as if 
 we had been blackleading grates. 
 
 But this craze soon died out. Stephen got 
 handsome seals which he mounted very neatly, 
 and polished up until they shone like gold ; but 
 most of us had to content ourselves with deposits 
 of brown dust like that in the hollow core of a 
 maggotty apple. 
 
 Stephen explained very learnedly how it was 
 this happened, but we were too stupid to learn 
 how to keep it from happening ; and electro- 
 typing went out of fashion at Axleford almost 
 as rapidly as it had come into fashion. 
 
 One of Stephen's electrotype seals had Mi- 
 nerva's Owl on it. He was very proud of this
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 213 
 
 seal, considering it emblematic of his own cha- 
 racter. He wore it on all high days and holidays. 
 He had it on at a breaking-up party, at which 
 Stephen did look like an owl but not a very 
 wise one. 
 
 One of the grown-up people the Doctor had 
 invited was a funny fellow, who was very fond of 
 teasing Stephen. There was a great talk about 
 mesmerism then just as there is now-a-days 
 about spirit-rapping and in the course of the 
 evening, this Mr. Johnson began to tell some 
 most wonderful stories about what he had seen 
 at mesmeric stances in London. He knew that 
 it made Stephen wild to hear about mesmerism, 
 and so he finished off with 
 
 " There, Monckton, what do you say to animal 
 magnetism now ? " 
 
 "Those who do the things are knaves, and 
 those who believe in them are fools," was Scien- 
 tific Stephen's sententious but not very civil 
 answer.
 
 THE BOYS OF AXLEFORD. 
 
 "Well, will you let me try to mesmerize you ?" 
 " I defy you, if you try for half a year." 
 " But you '11 do just what I tell you to give me 
 a chance ? " 
 
 Stephen consented, and Mr. Johnson placed 
 two chairs in the middle of the room, and seated 
 Stephen on one of them. Then he went out, 
 coming back in a little time with two cups, full of 
 water, on two plates. 
 
 "Now, remember," said Mr. Johnson, as he 
 seated himself on the empty chair, "you must 
 never take your eyes off me till I make you 
 close them and imitate everything I do." 
 
 Then he handed Stephen one of the cups on 
 one of the plates, and began what he called the 
 "passes." Ladies and girls, masters and boys, 
 crowded round in a circle. At first there was an 
 awe-hushed stillness, but in a minute why you 
 will hear directly we all of us had hard work 
 to keep our countenances. Ever and anon Mr. 
 Johnson dipped the tips of his fingers into the
 
 SCIENTIFIC STEPHEN. 215 
 
 water, rubbed them on the bottom of his plate, 
 and then drew them over his nose, round his eyes, 
 and down and across his forehead and his face. 
 
 Stephen scrupulously imitated every move- 
 ment, conscientiously anxious to give the "science 
 falsely so called" a fair chance, but wearing a 
 supercilious look of scientific incredulity that 
 every moment grew more comical. Presently 
 Mr. Johnson wetted the palm of his hand, rubbed 
 it on the bottom of his plate as if he were scour- 
 ing the platter, and then rubbed his hand all over 
 his face as if he were soaping it Stephen fol- 
 lowed his example as conscientiously and super- 
 ciliously as ever. 
 
 "Don't you feel sleepy now?" asked Mr. 
 Johnson. 
 
 " Not a bit of it," answered Stephen. " I said 
 it was all humbug, and I Ve proved it." 
 
 " Surely you must feel something," Mr. John- 
 son persisted. "Doesn't he look strange, poor 
 fellow ? Bring him a looking-glass."
 
 216 THE BOYS OF AXLE FORD. 
 
 We waited until the astounded Stephen had 
 seen himself in it, and then let loose the peal 
 after peal of laughter we had found it so hard to 
 keep in. 
 
 Stephen's plate had been held over the smoke 
 of a candle before it was given him, and he was 
 as black in the face as a sweep. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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