SCHOOL DAYS
clear the town, and are well out between the hedgerows again as the town clock strikes eight.
The sun shines almost warmly, and breakfast has oiled all springs and loosened all tongues. Tom is encouraged by a remark or two of the guard's between the puffs of his oily cheroot, and besides is getting tired of not talking; he is too full of his destination to talk about anything else; and so asks the guard if he knows Rugby.
"Goes through it every day of my life. Twenty minutes afore twelve down—ten o'clock up."
"What sort of a place is it, please?" says Tom.
Guard looks at him with a comical expression. "Werry out-o'-the-way place, sir; no paving to the streets nor no lighting. 'Mazin' big horse and cattle fair in autumn—lasts a week—just over now. Takes town a week to get clean after it. Fairish hunting country. But slow place, sir, slow place: off the main road, you see—only three coaches a day, and one on 'em a two-oss wan, more like a hearse nor a coach—Regulator—comes from Oxford. Young genl'm'n at school calls her Pig and Whistle, and goes up to college by her (six miles an hour) when they goes to enter. Belong to school, sir?"
"Yes," says Tom, not unwilling for a moment that the guard should think him an old boy. But then having some qualms as to the truth of the assertion, and seeing that if he were to assume the character of an old boy he couldn't go on asking the questions he wanted, added—"that is to say, I'm on my way there. I'm a new boy."
The guard looked as if he knew this quite as well as Tom.
"You're werry late, sir," says the guard; "only six weeks to-day to the end of the half." Tom assented. "We takes up fine loads this day six weeks, and Monday and Tuesday arter. Hopes we shall have the pleasure of carrying you back."
Tom said he hoped they would; but he thought within himself that his fate would probably be the Pig and Whistle.
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