unting fox-grapes on a Saturday in fall, or rambling truantly on a fair spring morning, and chuckling to hear the school-bells calling in vain to us across the meadows, it was fine to say:
"Gee! If there was only a game-keeper to get into a row with!"
And then hear Peter's answer:
"Gee, yes! Remember how Velveteens caught Tom up a tree?"
It was fine, I say, because it proved that Peter, too, knew Tom Brown's School Days, and all about Slogger Williams and Tom's fight with him, all about East and Arthur and Dr. Arnold, and Tom in the last chapter standing alone in the Rugby chapel by the doctor's grave.
One night in winter I remember keeping watch—hard-pressed was Cæsar by the hordes of Gaul—a merest stripling from among the legions, stealthily deserted post, braving the morrow's reckoning to linger in delicious idleness by his father's shelves. There, in a tattered copy of an old Harper's, whose cover fluttered to the hearth-rug, his eyes fell upon a set of drawings of a gate, a quadrangle, a tower door with ivy over it, a cricket-field with boys playing and scattering a flock of sheep, a shop (at this his eyes grew wider)—a mere little Englishy village-shop, to be sure, but not like others, for this, indeed, was Sallie Harrowell's, where Tom bought baked potatoes and a pennyworth of tea! And out of one full, dark page looked Dr. Arnold—a face as fine and wise and tender as Bertram Weatherby had fancied it, so that he turned from it but to turn back again, thinking how Tom had looked upon its living presence in more wondrous days. Cæsar's deserter read and looked, and looked and read again, beside the hearth, forgetting the legions in the Gallic wilds, forgetting the Roman sentry calls for the cries of cricketers, and seeing naught but the guarded wickets on an English green and how the sheep browsed peacefully under the windows in the vines.
Schoolward next morning Rugby and Cæsar nestled together beneath his arm. He found his Little Rugby on a hill—a red brick school-house standing awkwardly and solemn-eyed in its threadbare playground, for all the world like a poor school-master, impoverished without, well stocked within. It was an ugly, mathematical-looking Rugby, austere and angular, and without a shred of vine or arching bough for birds or dreams to nest in, yet Bertram Weatherby hailed it joyfully, ran lightly up its painted steps, and flung wide open its great hall-door. A flood of sound gushed forth—laughter, boisterous voices, chatter of girls, and the movement of restless feet. Across the threshold familiar faces turned, smiling, familiar voices rose from the tumult, his shoulders tingled with the buffets of familiar hands.
"Hello, Bildad!"
"Hello, old saw-horse!"