“Ay, ay!” said Archer, knowing that he had been cheated, and yet proud of managing a carpenter, “ay, ay! I know the way to manage everybody. Let the things be ready in an hour’s time, and hark’e! leave your tools by mistake behind you, and a thousand of twenty-penny nails. Ask no questions, and keep your own counsel like a wise man. Off with you, and take care of ‘the doctor.’”
“Archers, Archers, to the Archers’ tree! Follow your leader,” cried he, sounding his well known whistle as a signal. His followers gathered round him, and he, raising himself upon the mount at the foot of the tree, counted his numbers, and then, in a voice lower than usual, addressed them thus:—“My friends, is there a Greybeard amongst us? If there is, let him walk off at once, he has my free leave.” No one stirred. “Then we are all Archers, and we will stand by one another. Join hands, my friends.” They all joined hands. “Promise me not to betray me, and I will go on. I ask no security but your honour.” They all gave their honour to be secret and faithful, as he called it, and he went on. “Did you ever hear of such a thing as a ‘Barring Out,’ my friends?” They had heard of such a thing, but they had only heard of it.
Archer gave the history of a “Barring Out,” in which he had been concerned at his school, in which the boys stood out against the master, and gained their point at last, which was a week’s more holidays at Easter. [256] “But if we should not succeed,” said they, “Dr. Middleton is so steady; he never goes back from what he has said.”
“Did you ever try to push him back? Let us be steady and he’ll tremble. Tyrants always tremble when—”
“Oh,” interrupted a number of voices; “but he is not a tyrant—is he?”
“All schoolmasters are tyrants—are not they?” replied Archer; “and is not he a schoolmaster?”
To this logic there was no answer; but, still reluctant, they asked, “What they should get by a Barring Out?”
“Get!—everything!—what we want!—which is everything to lads of spirit—victory and liberty! Bar him out till he repeals his tyrannical law; till he lets us into our own theatre again, or till he tells us his ‘good reasons’ against it.”
“But perhaps he has reasons for not telling us.”
“Impossible!” cried Archer, “that’s the way we are always to be governed by a man in a wig, who says he has good reasons, and can’t tell them. Are you fools? Go! go back to De Grey! I see you are all Greybeards. Go! Who goes first?” Nobody would go first. “I will have nothing to do with ye, if ye are resolved to be slaves!” “We won’t be slaves!” they all exclaimed at once. “Then,” said Archer, “stand out in the right and be free.”