“No—it puzzled me.”
“I will tell you then,” replied Coleman, sinking his voice almost to a whisper—“the billiard table!”
After telling me this, Coleman, evidently fearing to commit himself further with one of whom he knew so little, turned the conversation, and, finding it still wanted more than an hour to dinner, proposed that we should take a stroll along the shore together. In the course of our walk I acquired the additional information that another pupil was expected in a few days—the only son of Sir John Oaklands, a baronet of large fortune in Hertfordshire; and that an acquaintance of Coleman's, who knew him, said he was a capital fellow, but very odd—though in what the oddity consisted did not appear. Moreover, Coleman confirmed me in my preconceived idea, that Mullins's genius lay at present chiefly in the eating, drinking, and sleeping line—adding that, in his opinion, he bore a striking resemblance to those somewhat dissimilar articles, a muff and a spoon. In converse such as this, the time slipped away, till we suddenly discovered that we had only a quarter of an hour left in which to walk back to Langdale Terrace, and prepare for dinner; whereupon a race began, in which my longer legs gave me so decided an advantage over Coleman that he declared he would deliver me up to the tender mercies of the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” for what he was pleased to call “an aggravated case of over-driving a private pupil”.
We had not more than five minutes left when we arrived at Dr. Mildman's door, Coleman affording a practical illustration of the truth of the aphorism, that “it is the pace that kills”; so that Thomas's injunction, “Look sharp, gentlemen,” was scarcely necessary to induce us to rush upstairs two steps at a time. In the same hurry I entered my bedroom, without observing that the door was standing ajar rather suspiciously, for which piece of inattention I was rewarded by a deluge of water, which wetted me from head to foot, and a violent blow on the shoulder, which stretched me on the ground in the midst of a puddle. That I may not keep the reader in suspense I will at once inform him that I was indebted for this agreeable surprise to the kindness and skill of Lawless, who, having returned from his pigeon-match half-an-hour sooner than was necessary, had devoted it to the construction of what he called a “booby trap,” which ingenious piece of mechanism was arranged in the following manner: The victim's room-door was placed ajar, and upon the top thereof a Greek Lexicon, or any other equally ponderous volume, was carefully balanced, and upon this was set in its turn a jug of water. If all these were properly adjusted, the catastrophe above described was certain to ensue when the door was opened.
“Fairly caught, by Jove,” cried Lawless, who had been on the watch.
“By Jupiter Pluvius, you should have said,” joined in Coleman, helping me up again; for so sudden and unexpected had been the shock that I had remained for a moment just as I had fallen, with a kind of vague expectation that the roof of the house would come down upon me.
“I suppose I have to thank you for that,” said I, turning to Lawless.
“Pray, don't mention it, Pinafore,” was the answer; “what little trouble I had in making the arrangement, I can assure you, was quite repaid by its success.”