"Yes, please, sir. With luck the fierceness of the tiger ought to go into me," explained Smythe.
"This is almost too much," said Dr. Dunstan.
"Because I thought that to be as fierce as a Bengal tiger would be useful, sir," Smythe ventured to say.
"Silence, sir!" roared the Doctor in such a tremendous tone of voice that Steggles whispered to me the Doctor himself must have been wearing about a dozen tigers' tails all his life.
"And how dare you want to be fierce, sir?" went on the Doctor. "You come among us a child from a Christian home—an inexperienced and ignorant youth. And yet at ten—for that is your age, Huxley Smythe—you develop a disgraceful yearning to deteriorate from the state of civilization to which you are born; you debase your intellect and your morality by deliberate efforts to become demoralized; you seek to take a retrograde step, and recover the ferocity of primitive—or, as we say, pre-Adamite—humanity. You have striven to acquire the physical brutality of palæolithic man, sir, and—worse, far worse—you deliberately endeavour to impress upon your nature the disgusting attributes of one of the most pestilential animals that an inscrutable Providence has created and let loose upon this planet. He who could seek to secure the attributes of the tiger, Huxley Smythe, must already possess the potentialities of the wild ass! Never in the whole course of my scholastic experience have I met anything quite so painful as this depravity in a child of ten. Shed no tears, sir," went on the Doctor; "the time has not yet come for tears."
Because Smythe was blubbing a good deal at this dreadful view the Doctor had taken of him. Of course he didn't understand a word of it, and that made it all the worse.
"And where is my tiger's tail now, sir?" finally asked Dr. Dunstan.
"On, sir," answered Smythe humbly.
"Then it had better be taken off, sir!" said Dunstan, and he roared again. "Divest yourself of your upper attire, wretched boy. Let this lesson not be lost on the least among us. Take off your clothes, sir, so that one and all of us shall be warned what evil instincts may, and do still mar human nature in the most unexpected quarters. I mourn for your accomplished father, Smythe; and still more for your poor mother. It was none too soon that they sent you into my care, young though you be. Go and stand beside the fire, sir, that the ordeal may not physically injure you."
The kid went to the chapel fire, which always burns in winter, and took off his coat and his waistcoat, his collar and his tie, and his shirt and his vest. Under the vest, fastened round pretty tight, just below his ribs, was the tiger's tail. He looked awfully rum like this, and still cried a bit. A few chaps, including several of the sixth, laughed out loud at the appearance of Smythe and the tail; but the Doctor soon shut them up.