Of course, we were awfully sold at first, and by no means in an amiable frame of mind. It is no joke to be done out of Christmas at home. What a dolt that Gilks was to get scarlet fever! Why could he not have waited till he got home?
But after a day or two we shook down, as British boys will, to our lot. After all, it was only a case of putting off our holiday, and meanwhile we were allowed to do anything we liked, short of setting the place on fire, or kicking up a row near the infirmary.
There were enough of us to turn out two good teams at football, or to run a big paper-chase across country, or get up a grand concert of an evening; and not too many of us to crowd into the long dormitory, where, for all we were interfered with, we might have prolonged our bolster matches “from eve to dewy morn.”
In time we came to look upon our confinement as rather a spree than otherwise, and this feeling was considerably heightened by the arrival of several hampers at the beginning of Christmas week, including a magnificent one from Dr Allsuch himself, along with a message bidding us be sure and have a merry Christmas. We voted the doctor a brick, and drank his health in ginger beer, with great enthusiasm, to the toast of “Dr Allsuch, and all such bricks!”
It was on Christmas Eve, after a specially grand banquet off the contents of one of these hampers, that we crowded round the big common-hall fire in a very complacent frame of mind, uncommonly well satisfied and comfortable within and without.
“I don’t know,” said Lamb meditatively, cracking a walnut between his finger and thumb, and slowly skinning it—“I don’t know; Gilks might have done us a worse turn after all.”
“I rather wish he’d make a yearly thing of it,” said Ellis. “They say he’s pulled through all right.”
“Oh yes, he’s all right! and so are the other three. In fact, French and Addley never had scarlet fever at all. It was a false alarm.”
“Well,” said Lamb, “I’m jolly glad of it! I wouldn’t have cared for any of them to die, you know.”
Lamb said this in a tone as if we should all be rather surprised to hear him say so.