“Will that stop it?”
“Yes.”
“Mind and get your hair parted right, lads. Examination day!”
“I’ll give any fellow a penny to clean my boots.”
“Why don’t you let Tycho clean ’em?”
“Hot water, gentlemen! hot water! Any gentleman who wants his boots cleaned please to set them outside the door.”
“There, get out. It won’t do, Tommy Smithers. I’d swear to that squeak of yours from a thousand.”
“If you come that trick again, Tommy, we’ll make you clean every pair of boots in the corridor,” shouted a fresh speaker, for by degrees the yawning, and creaking of iron beds and thuds of bare feet upon bare floors had grown frequent, with shuffling noises, and gurgling, and splashing, the chinking of ewers against basins, the swishing of tooth-brushes, and the stamping of chilblained feet being thrust into hard, stout boots, and all done in a hurried, bustling manner, as if those who dressed were striving by rapid movement to get some warmth into their chilly frames.
Luke Ross was one of the first dressed: a well-built, dark-eyed, keen-looking young man of five-and-twenty, with a good deal of decision about his well-shaped mouth.
The noise and bustle was on the increase. With numerous grumblings and unsatisfied longings floating about his ears, he stood gazing at the square patch of yellow light near his door, thinking of the trials of the day to come, till, apparently brought back to the present by the shudder of cold that ran through him, he turned and began to pace rapidly up and down his little room, from the dark window covered with soft pats of sooty snow to the dormitory door.