CHAPTER VIII.
MAX MAKES A TREATY OF PEACE.
“I don’t believe you fellows know how hard you are making it for Mr. Boniface,” Lieutenant Wilde had said to the boys who were gathered in his room one night, not long before Thanksgiving. “I told him so the other day when we were talking about it, for I don’t think any one of you would be mean enough to try to break up his classes.”
The subject was unexpected to them all, and for a moment they were speechless.
“Has he been complaining of us,” asked Jack scornfully, after the pause.
“Yes and no,” answered Lieutenant Wilde. “I saw that something was wrong, and asked him about it. He told me then, and not till then. You would all have been sorry for him, if you had seen him that day, for he seemed to feel so keenly that he was making a failure here. Now aren’t you boys all of you loyal enough to the doctor to feel that you must be polite and respectful to any man he may choose to put in here over you? Any rudeness to one of his teachers is an insult to himself.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” confessed Max frankly. “But Bony and the doctor are two different people.”
“That may be,” responded Lieutenant Wilde, as he pulled off his spectacles and fell to twirling them by the slender, bent ends of the bows; “but Mr. Boniface represents the doctor in his classes. And moreover, he’s come here a stranger, and you who know each other and the place, ought to try to make him feel at home, instead of forming a league against him, to torment him with childish tricks that are more suited to Gyp than to cadets of your ages. He is hired to teach you and is paid for it, I know; but he has come here with as true a wish to help you and be friends with you, as the doctor himself, but you all treat him like an enemy instead.”
“What makes him so queer and glum with us, then?” said Jack, as he leaned forward to give the coals a vigorous punch.
“Don’t you know yet, Jack, that everybody isn’t just like everybody else? Mr. Boniface would like to be pleasant and cordial with you; but he hasn’t the gift of it, as the doctor has—”