"Ned, Frank, all of you! I know I shall like that man; can't help liking him. I'm bound to like him."
"I'm the same way!" shouted Horace Williams from the extreme right. "Didn't you see, boys, how he and Mr. Perkins caught hold of each other? That's what took me down. There's some soul in that man, I tell you."
"O, he's a bully man!" roared Clinton Blanchard from the extreme left; "a fellow can tell by the looks of him; he shows it right out in his face."
"You might know he's a first-rate man," cried Phil Greely; "else Mr. Perkins wouldn't love him so. I thought I never should like anybody else as Master Perkins; but I guess this man is just like him, and I mean to tell all the fellows I know."
By this time, as boy after boy kept stepping out, they had got into a circle, and further progress was necessarily arrested: not so, however, the expression of opinions.
"He has not a very scholarly look," said Edward Randolph, who was a very proper boy; "not at all the air of a close student. His hands are rough and hard; he hurt me when he shook my hand."
"You shut up,—will you?" retorted Dan. "You've got the dyspepsy."
"No, I haven't, neither."
"Well, you want to have it," said Frank Merrill.