Then stood up Adam Banister, a round thick-set youth, with brown hair and rosy face.
“Good luck to thee, Banister,” was the cry.
How easily he drew his ponderous bow: the arrow whizzed—alas, only the second circle was attained.
And now the third champion.
It is Nicholas Grabber. Let our readers mark him, he will often figure in these pages.
A lad of average height, with a head of very bright red hair, which seems positively to shine; his face is deeply freckled, but his appearance not altogether unprepossessing, save for a certain expression of slyness which would indicate a mixture of the fox in his character; those who believed in the transmigration of souls might recognize the retriever in Gregory, the bull in Banister, the fox in Grabber, and—well we will leave them to designate the fourth after reading his history, for it was Cuthbert.
One after the other they discharge their arrows; the first shaft strikes the bull’s-eye, but amid shouts of admiration, the second, that of Cuthbert, pierces as near the centre.
“Hurrah!” “Grabber!” “Cuthbert!” and the names were repeated again and again by the crowd.
“Move the target fifty yards further, and let them shoot yet again.”
They were rivals, these two boys, and not such good friends as they should have been. Grabber envied Cuthbert his place in the Abbot’s favour, which he had utterly failed to attain; for had he not run away, and had not his father sent him back to school, coupled between two foxhounds, under the charge of the huntsman, a story never forgotten by his schoolfellows.[9] However, he was a good shot, a ringleader in boyish mischief, and not without his friends.