“And do you work very hard?” inquired Percy.
“Not we,” was the reply. “Of course, for decency’s sake, we do something. It don’t pay for a fellow to be quite an ignoramus in these days, unless he happens to have been born a lord, or experienced some such jolly dispensation at starting; but as for hard work,—no, thank ye. What’s the use of having a fag, if you can’t get your exercises done for you, I should like to know?”
“What’s a fag?” inquired Hugh.
The first effect of this apparently simple question was to throw the person to whom it was addressed into a state of the most violent laughter. As soon as he could recover breath, he gasped out, “Oh, lor! it’s very fatiguing; you’ll be the death of me with your blessed innocence, that you will.”
After a less severe relapse, he continued, “You’ll soon know what fagging means, you poor, unfortunate, green little warmint; though I think I shall honour you by taking you myself. I’ve a right to a fag now I’m in the fifth form; and the chap I had last half has left. You seem a jolly, good-tempered little beggar, and I shouldn’t like to see you made miserable.”
“He shall never be ill-used while I am alive,” exclaimed Percy, with flashing eyes.
“That’s a very proper and plucky sentiment on your part, my dear boy,” returned Wilfred; “but it’s a precious deal easier to talk about than to act upon. You can’t thrash a whole school, especially when some of them are almost men grown. Such chaps as Biggington or Thwackings, who can polish off a coalheaver sporting style, for instance; your namesake Hotspur himself would have found such fellows as them tough customers. All you can do with them is to keep ’em in good humour while you can, and get out of their way when you can’t.”
“But all this time you have not told me what a fag is,” interrupted Hugh.
“Well, a fag is a small boy, taken possession of by a larger boy, according to an old established precedent, against which the masters set their faces in vain. The small boy thus enslaved is termed a fag, and his duties are to do everything the larger boy finds it impossible or disagreeable to do himself. If the small boy performs these duties zealously and good-humouredly, he is only kicked and driven about like a dog, and survives to become a fifth, and eventually a sixth form boy, and takes his change out of fags of his own. If he sulks, or neglects orders, he is either half or three-quarters murdered, according to the hands he falls into, and is usually taken away from the school, or otherwise expended, before he reaches hobble-de-hoy’s estate. And now, have I made that clear to your juvenile capacity?—Yes?—Then mind you profit by it, or I shall have to show you practically how Tickletonians tickle,” and as he spoke, he pointed suggestively to his cane, though a good-natured twinkle in his eye contradicted the threat.
Having thus broken ground, he favoured the company with a series of dissolving views, illustrating various episodes of Tickletonian life, wherein were vividly portrayed scrapes got into and out of with much ability, and more impudence, by certain scholastic heroes, past and present; but the gist of each anecdote lying in the discomfiture or mystification of one or more of the masters, it is scarcely to be supposed, giving Wilfred Jacob credit for the most open disposition imaginable, that he would have been quite so communicative, had he divined the capacity in which Ernest Carrington was then journeying to Tickletown.