“Master Brunswood says that he will birch whoever cometh late,” objected Hal Saddler.
“Birch?” groaned Nick. “Why, he does nothing but birch! A fellow can na say his ‘sum, es, est’ without catching it. And as for getting through the ‘genitivo’ and ‘vocativo’ without a downright threshing—” He shrugged his shoulders ruefully as he remembered his unlearned lesson. Everything had gone wrong with him that morning, and the thought of the birching that he was sure to get was more than he could bear. “I will na stand it any longer—I’ll run away!”
Kit Sedgewick laughed ironically. “And when the skies fall we’ll catch sparrows, Nick Attwood,” said he. “Whither wilt thou run?”
Stung by his tone of ridicule, Nick out with the first thing that came into his head. “To Coventry, after the stage-players,” said he, defiantly.
The whole crowd gave an incredulous hoot.
Nick’s face flushed. To be crossed at home, to be birched at school, to work all May-day in the tannery vats, and to be laughed at—it was too much.
“Ye think that I will na? Well, I’ll show ye! ’Tis only eight miles to Warwick, and hardly more than that beyond—no walk at all; and Diccon Haggard, my mother’s cousin, lives in Coventry. So out upon your musty Latin—English is good enough for me this day! There’s bluebells blowing in the dingles, and cuckoo-buds no end. And while ye are all grinding at your old Aesop I shall be roaming over the hills wherever I please.”
As he spoke he thought of the dark, wainscoted walls of the school-room with their narrow little windows overhead, of the foul-smelling floors of the tannery in Southam’s lane, and his heart gave a great, rebellious leap. “Ay,” said he, exultantly, “I shall be out where the birds can sing and the grass is green, and I shall see the stage-play, while ye will be mewed up all day long in school, and have nothing but a beggarly morris and a farthing May-pole on the morrow.”
“Oh, no doubt, no doubt,” said Hal Saddler, mockingly “We shall have but bread and milk, and thou shalt have—a most glorious threshing from thy father when thou comest home again!”
That was the last straw to Nick’s unhappy heart.