"There will be no fireworks this year."
"There will be no fireworks this year."
Page 145.
From the consternation depicted on the faces of the sixty odd boys to whom this announcement was made, it might have been supposed that they had just heard there would be a famine in the land, or that some other calamity of an equally serious nature was about to befall them.
Mr. Chard, the headmaster of Yatby Grammar School, was the speaker. He had held this position since the commencement of the winter term, and it was now the 2nd of November.
"I don't intend there should be any more of these firework displays," he continued. "They are dangerous, and often result in accidents, the consequences of which have to be suffered for a lifetime. As you know, I am anxious to encourage healthy outdoor sport, and in fact any kind of rational amusement; but I see no object in these gunpowder carnivals, and the subscription which Brookfield says you received on former occasions from the headmaster I will hand over to the treasurer of the Games Club. Pass on in order."
Desk after desk, the boys filed out of the big schoolroom into the square, gravelled playground at the back of the school buildings, where, freed from the enforced silence of assembly, the air was immediately filled with a babel of voices.
"No fireworks!" cried one; "what rot!"
"Well, I do call this beastly shabby!" exclaimed another. "Old Gregory never objected to our having fireworks on the Fifth, and why should Chard?"
Away in one corner Brookfield, the captain of the football club, and a leading spirit among the boarders, stood addressing a little group of his companions.