“Where’s your weasel?”
“Oh, I shall get Magglin or Bob Hopley to shoot me one some day. Wish I’d got a gun of my own!”
“You’re always wishing for guns and watches, or something else you haven’t got,” I said, laughing.
“Well, that’s quite natural, isn’t it?” cried Mercer good-humouredly. “I always feel like that, and it does seem a shame that old Eely should have tail coats and white waistcoats and watches, and I shouldn’t. But, I say, Frank, he can’t fight, can he?”
“No,” I said, “but don’t talk about it. I hate thinking of it now.”
“I don’t,” said Mercer. “I shall always think about it when I come up here, and feel as I did then, punching poor old Dicksee’s big fat head. I say, won’t it do him good and make him civil? Look here,” he continued, making a bound and pointing to a knot on the rough floor boards, “that’s the exact spot where his head came down whop.”
Chapter Twenty One.
We boys used to think the days at old Browne’s very long and tedious, and often enough feel a mortal hatred of Euclid as a tyrant who had invented geometry for the sake of driving boys mad. What distaste, too, we had for all the old Romans who had bequeathed their language to us; just as if English wasn’t ten times better, Mercer used to say.