come up, and the boys were laughing because he wanted a stable lanthorn, and threatened to tell my mother.
"Time is up," cried another boy, more headlong than head-monitor. "If we count three before the come of thee, thwacked thou art, and must go to the women." I felt it hard upon me. He began to count, one, two, three—but before the "three" was out of his mouth, I was facing my foe, with both hands up, and my breath going rough and hot, and resolved to wait the turn of it. For I had found seat on the knee of a boy sage and skilled to tutor me, who knew how much the end very often differs from the beginning. A rare ripe scholar he was; and now he hath routed up the Germans in the matter of criticism. Sure the clever boys and men have most love towards the stupid ones.
"Finish him off, Bob," cried a big boy, and that I noticed especially, because I thought it unkind of him, after eating of my toffee as he had that afternoon; "finish him off, neck and crop; he deserves it for sticking up to a man like you."
But I was not so to be finished off, though feeling in my knuckles now as if it were a blueness and a sense of chillblain. Nothing held except my legs, and they were good to help me. So this bout, or round, if you please, was foughten warily by me, with gentle recollection of what my tutor, the clever boy, had told me, and some resolve to earn his praise before I came back to his knee again. And never, I think, in all my life, sounded sweeter words in my ears (except when my love loved me) than when my second and backer,
