"Shall you ever preach again here?" I asked him.

And he said not. He said—

"No. On the whole it isn't good enough. And yet you mustn't think I mind the martyrdom. Only of course I don't want to be utterly martyred and done for before I grow up."

He evidently meant to be a martyr in rather a biggish way in foreign parts, like the Germans in China; because when they are bashed by the heathen, Germany always gets a few miles of China as payment. And so Germany is proud of her martyrs, and the Emperor too.

What did become of Richmond minimus I can't tell you. He ran away once, to do good on a large scale, but he was captured and brought back before he had time to do much worth mentioning. He'll tell you that story himself. Anyway, he never preached again, and the whole affair, if it did nothing else, helped to show what Stopford was.

THE 'BOLSOVER' PRIZE

No. VI

THE 'BOLSOVER' PRIZE

I

There was once a chap at Dunstan's, ages and ages ago, called Bolsover, who turned into a novelist afterwards; and he was so frightfully keen about other chaps turning into novelists too that he gave a prize for composition. It was a book worth a guinea, and Dr. Dunstan had to choose it each year, and only the junior school was allowed to enter for it, according to the conditions made by the chap who gave it. Gideon calculated it out, and said that as twenty pounds is about good for one pound at simple interest in an ordinary way, the novelist chap must have handed twenty pounds over to Dr. Dunstan; and Steggles said he rather doubted if the novelist chap would have much cared for the books that Dr. Dunstan chose for the prizes; because they were not novels at all, but very improving books—chiefly natural history; which Steggles said was not good for trade from the novelist chap's point of view.