"‘You’re the only boy I ever met with a grain of sense in his head. Now, if I gave you a check on my bankers in Merivale for five pounds to-day, and wrote to you to-morrow morning to say I had changed my mind, what would you do?’
“I said, ‘It would be too late, sir, because your check would have been sent off to my father that very night, to put out at interest for me.’ He said, ‘That’s right. Never give back money, or anything.’ Then he asked me my name, and told me I might come back to-morrow and look for my tooth by daylight.”
That was Gideon’s most peculiar adventure, and, though he never found the tooth or saw old Grimbal again, yet about seven or eight months afterwards, when old Grimbal was discovered all curiously twisted up and dead in bed by the man who took him his breakfast, the result of Gideon’s visit to him came out. Old Grimbal had specially put him into his will by some legal method, and Doctor Dunston had Gideon into his study three days after old Grimbal kicked. It then was proved that old Grimbal had left Gideon all the things that came over the wall, and also a legacy of fifty pounds in money, because, according to the bit of the will which the Doctor read to Gideon out of a lawyer’s letter, he was the only boy old Grimbal had ever met with who showed any intelligence above that of the anthropoid ape.
Gideon returned all the balls and things to their owners free of charge, but not until the rightful owners proved they were so. And the money he sent to his father; and his father, he told me afterwards, was so jolly pleased about the whole affair that he added nine hundred and fifty pounds to old Grimbal’s fifty. Therefore, by shooting Gideon’s front tooth at a robin, Slade was actually putting the enormous sum of one thousand pounds into Gideon’s pocket, which I should think was about the rummest thing that ever happened in the world.
Gideon stopped at Dunston’s one term after that. Then he went away, and, I believe, began to help his father to sell diamonds. He was fairly good at French, and very at German; but of other things he knew rather little, except arithmetic, and his was the most beautiful arithmetic which had ever been done at Merivale; for I heard Stokes, who was a seventeenth wrangler in his time, tell the Doctor so.
The Chemistry Class
This story about Guy Fawkes’s Night at Dunston’s is worth knowing, because it shows the rumminess of Nubby Tomkins. Tomkins, I may say, was called “Nubby,” owing to his nose, which was extremely huge, though he said it was Roman, and swore he wouldn’t change it if he could. Anyway, Bradwell made a rhyme about it that is certainly good enough to repeat. He wrote it first on a black-board with chalk, and a good many chaps learned it by heart.
It ran like this:
“Our Nubby’s nose is ponderous,
And our Nubby’s nose is long;