"By Jove! he's a brick," said Frank, as he hurried across the yard. "I thought I was going to find a bear, and he was nothing more than a kindly human being with a whole reservoir of good advice."
Mr. Parks, the assistant master, inducted Frank into the school routine, and the boy's school life began that morning auspiciously. He felt that he had made a good friend in the Doctor, and he was bent on satisfying his demand as far as studies were concerned. As to how he would make his way with his schoolmates, was another matter, and he approached it with less of a feeling of certainty.
In the early afternoon of that day Frank made a call on his old friend Jimmy, who was industriously working up his history; but when Frank put his head in at the door, the history book was shut with a snap.
"Hello, Web-foot, how did you get along last night? No hazers, I hope."
"Got along finely," said Frank, "in spite of lots of excitement. Took a forced swim in the Wampaug last night, preceded by a young scrap in No. 18, and this morning I had a session with the Doctor, who gave me enough good advice to keep me straight in line through the whole school course."
"The dickens you say!" exclaimed Jimmy. "You don't mean to say that they got you after all?"
"They certainly did, got me good and hard. Started out to stretch my neck down on the meadows somewhere,—that was the sentence they said,—and then changed their minds, not being willing to sacrifice a budding young genius like myself, and gave me the water cure."
"The water cure?"
"Yes, the water cure, which consisted in making me swim the river, after nine o'clock, and back in my bare pelt."