"You 'ear, now," he said, looking round with a veteran's contempt upon the squad of recruits in pauperism, "if none on yer don't break out with somethink before the week's over, I'll flay the lot. I'm not pertikler for what it is. Last time it was measles first, and then ringworm. Nigh on seven weeks I stopt 'ere with nothink to do only eat, and never got so much as a smell of the school. What's them teachers got to learn me, I'd like to know?"
He paused with rhetorical defiance, but as no one answered he proceeded to express the teachers and officers in terms of unmentionable quantities. Suddenly he turned upon a big, vacant-looking boy at his side.
"What's yer name, fat-'ead?" he asked.
The boy backed away a pace or two, and stood gently moving his head about, and staring with his large pale eyes, as a calf stares at a dog.
"Speak, you dyin' oyster!" said Clem, kicking his shins.
"Ernest," said the boy, with a sudden gasp, turning fiery red and twisting his fingers into knots.
"Ernest what?" said Clem. "But it don't matter, for your sort always belongs to the fine old family of Looney. You're a deal too good for the likes of us. Why, you ought to 'ave a private asylum all to yerself. Hi, Missus!" he shouted to the porter's wife who was passing through the room. "This young nobleman's name's Looney, isn't it?"
"Looks as if it 'ad ought to be," she answered, with a smile, for she avoided unnecessary difficulties. It was her duty to act as mother to the children in the probation ward, and she had already mothered about five thousand.
"Well, Looney," Clem went on as soon as she had gone, "I'll give you a fair run for your money. By next Sunday week you must 'ave a sore 'ead or sore eyes, or I'll see as you get both. But p'raps I may as well take two of the lot of yer in 'and at once."
He seized the daft creature and Alfred by the short hair at the back of their heads, and began running them up and down as a pair of ponies. The others laughed, partly for flattery, partly for change.