"We might do well to imitate our English cousins."
"Just what I say," whispered young Bertram Weatherby.
"The Prof.'s all right," Peter whispered back.
And so, down-town, after school that day, behold!—sitting on stools at Billy's Palace Lunch Counter, in the Odd Fellow's Block—two fine, manly chaps, not in white cricket flannels, to be sure, but—
"It's some like Sallie Harrowell's," one mumbled, joyously, crunching his buttered toast, and the other nodded, taking his swig of tea.
So it came to pass that they looked reverently upon the Professor with Rugbeian eyes, and more admiringly as they noted new likenesses between him and the great head-master. There was a certain resemblance of glowing countenance, they told themselves, a certain ardor of voice, as they imagined, and over all a sympathy for boys.
"Well," he would say, stopping them as they walked together arm in arm, "if you seek Peter, look for Bertram—eh?" giving their shoulders a bantering shake which pleased them greatly as they sauntered on.
Listening to his prayers in chapel, hearing at least the murmur of them as they bowed their heads, their minds swayed by the earnestness of the great man's voice rather than by the words he uttered, they felt that glow which comes sometimes to boys who read and dream. Then Bertram loved the touch of Peter's shoulder, and, with the memory of another doctor and another school-boy, he loved his Rugby, little and meagre and vineless though it was upon its threadbare hill. When he had left it he would return some day, he thought; he would stand like Tom in the last chapter; he would sit again at his old brown desk, alone, musing—missing his mate, and finding silence where happy whisperings and secret play had been—but still in the pine before him he would trace the letters he had cut, and, seeing them, he would be again the boy who cut them there.
One morning, such was the fervor of the Professor's voice, there was some such dream, and when it ended, prayer and dream together—