Nearer and nearer came the sounds, and George’s heart beat loud. He closed his book and pushed his chair back from the table, ready to defend himself, on an emergency, to the bitter end. Then, under the hearth, there was a sound of scraping and grating, then a rushing noise, and then George saw—two enormous rats!
Loud and long laughed my master to himself at the discovery. What cared he for rats? He pulled his chair back to the table, and buried himself in his book for the next three hours, until his lamp began to burn low, and the letters on the pages grew blurred and dim, and the rats had scuffled back by the way they came, and my flagging hands pointed to four o’clock.
Then George Reader, after kneeling in silent prayer, went to bed.
Note 1. At the college races at Cambridge the boats start one behind the other at fixed distances, and any boat overtaking and “bumping” the one in front of it moves up a place nearer to the “Head of the River.”
Chapter Twenty One.
How my master fared at Saint George’s College and met an old acquaintance of the reader’s there.
It is not my intention in these pages to give a full and particular account of George Reader’s college life. It would neither be on the whole interesting, nor would it be found to have much bearing on my own career, which is the ostensible theme of the present veracious history.