"Put that book down!" Magnus thundered at him, from his own corner.
"Oh, I can put it down easy enough," Rig said rather sulkily. "But I can't see what business it is of yours."
"Now fold your hands, and spell zero ten times backwards," said Magnus, "and then take your Davies, and go to work. Unless you want to fess solid for the rest of your life."
"Well—Say, Kin,—what a good fellow Mr. Upright is."
"Mr. Upright's a cold max. Mind your business."
Pushing and pulling did a good deal for Rig that winter. There was a little stir about the holidays, when the happy upper classmen who had won their Christmas leave went off for unlimited bliss in a limited time, and those who had lost it abused "luck." And there was also the mild interest of a better dinner than usual. But to the plebs, for whom no getting away was possible, and to whom no Point festivities were open, that first Christmas was a thing to live through as best they might. I think some of them despised even the dinner, with the flavour of their mother's cookery yet lingering and fresh.
How hard it was! "The most miserable day they ever spent," as many a one has said since. And the letters and home trifles that arrived in the mail-bag were not much help in the line of bracing up. Magnus put Cherry's bookmark in his Bible, and his mother's picture up his sleeve; while the toilet cushion and cover on which the two girls had bestowed so many loving looks, as they wrought out the pretty devices, were hid away in his clothes bag; no such decorations being allowed in barracks.
Then he wrote letters to them all, then he tried to study, but who can study on a legal holiday?
So at last Cadet Kindred donned his grey fearnaught, wandered down among the rocks and snow-drifts on Flirtation, and listened to the grinding of the ice cakes in the dark river. The sky, blue with an unearthly far-away depth of colour, was pushed back by the whitened hills: all nature seemed locked up and unapproachable and unsympathising.
"Those fair blue heavens so distant are,
Their very clearness seems to say
How far, how far!
They lie above man's stormy way."