Follow My Leader: The Boys of Templeton

by Talbot Baines Reed

“But I rather like the batting. Cartwright said I was improving.”

“Oh, of course; just a dodge to make you stick to it. Don’t you let them gammon you, Georgie. Stick to us, and hang Pledge.”

And, of course, Heathcote obeyed, and his cricket suffered; and fellows who had hopes of him shrugged their shoulders when they saw him rioting in the Den, and letting another usurp his pads.

Had Dick known the bad turn he was doing his friend he would have hesitated before requiring him to give up a healthy sport, which, just then, was one of his chief safeguards against far less healthy occupations.

The “spider” had not had the fly in his web for five weeks without casting some light toils around him. Heathcote himself would have said that Pledge was as inoffensive to-day as he had been on the first day of the term, and would have angrily scouted the idea that “Junius,” or any one else, had been right in his warnings.

And yet in five weeks Heathcote had begun not to be the nice boy he was. Not that Pledge, by any direct influence, incited him to evil-doing. On the contrary, he always corrected him when he prevaricated, and scolded him when he idled.

But the boy had begun a course of indirect training far more dangerous to his morals and happiness than any direct training could have been.

He discovered, very gradually, that Pledge’s notions of persons and things were unlike any he had hitherto entertained. In the innocence of his heart he had always given every one credit for being honest, and virtuous, until he had good cause to see otherwise. When any one told him a thing, he usually believed it straight off. If any one professed to be anything, he usually assumed it was so. The small knot of boys at Templeton who called themselves religious, who said their prayers steadily, who refused to do what their conscience would not allow, who tried to do good in some way or other to their fellows, these Heathcote had readily believed were Christians, and more than once he had wished he belonged to their set.

But, somehow, Pledge’s influence gave him altogether different ideas on these points. For instance, he would one evening hear a conversation somewhat as follows, between his senior and some friend—generally Wrangham of the Fifth, who usually associated with Pledge:

“I hear Holden is not going to try for the Bishop’s scholarship, after all,” says Wrangham, who, by the way, is aesthetic, and adopts an air of general weariness of the world which hardly becomes a boy of seventeen.