"If I let you go, you promise me to be back within half an hour? I don't know what Mrs. Fletcher will say if she should hear of it;--and don't get wet."
"I'll promise you fast enough. Mrs. Fletcher won't hear of it; and what if she does? She can't eat you. You needn't be afraid of my getting wet."
"I shan't let anybody else go."
"Oh yes, you will! You'll let Griffin and Ellis go; you don't think I'm going all that way alone?"
"And me!" cried Edgar Wheeler. Pretty nearly all the other boys joined him in the cry.
"I am not going to have all you fellows coming with me," announced Bertie. "Wheeler can come; but as for the rest of you, you can stay at home and go to bed--that's the best place for little chaps like you. Now then, Shane, look alive; is it going to cost you half a crown, or isn't it?"
Mr. Shane sighed. If ever there was a case of a round peg in a square hole, Mr. Shane's position at Mecklemburg House was a case in point. The youth, for he was but a youth, was a good youth; he had an earnest, honest, practical belief in God; but surely God never intended him for an assistant-master. Perhaps in the years to come he might drift into the place which had been prepared for him in the world, but it was difficult to believe that he was in it now. A studious dreamer, who did nothing but dream and study, he would have been no more out of his element in a bear garden than in the extremely difficult and eminently unsatisfactory position which he was supposed--it was veritable supposition--to fill at Mecklemburg House.
"How many of you want to go?"
"There's me,"--Bertie was not the boy to take the bottom seat--"and Griffin, and Ellis, and Wheeler, that's all. Now what is the good of keeping messing about like this?"
"You're sure you won't be more than half an hour?"