The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch

by Talbot Baines Reed

I had scarcely been deposited once more into my accustomed pocket, when a loud bell sounded down the corridors, and made Tom Drift jump as if he had been shot.

“I say, that’s the prayer-bell! Come on! unless you want to get into a jolly row.”

And without further words he seized the astonished Charlie by the arm, and ran with him at full speed along one or two empty passages, dashing at last in through a big door, which was in the very act of closing as the two reached it.

Charlie was so confused, and so out of breath with this astonishing and frantic race, that for a minute he did not know whether he was standing on his head or his heels.

There was, however, no time for solving the problem just then, for Tom Drift, still retaining his grasp on his arm, dragged him forward, whispering,—

“This way; wasn’t that a close shave? Get in here, and don’t make a noise.”

Charlie obeyed, and found himself in a pew, one of a congregation of some two hundred boys, assembled in the school chapel for evening prayers. At the far end of the chapel he could hear a man’s voice, reading; but what it said it was impossible for him to make out, owing to the talking that was going on around him.

He looked eagerly and curiously down the long rows of his new schoolfellows, feeling half afraid at the sight of so many new faces, and half proud of being a Randlebury boy, with a right to a seat in the chapel. And as he looked he saw some faces he thought he should like, and some that he thought he would dislike; there were merry, bright-eyed boys, like himself, and there were ill-tempered, sullen-looking boys; there were boys haggard with hard-reading, and boys who looked as if their heads were altogether empty.

But what puzzled and troubled Charlie not a little was to notice, that though the school was supposed to be at prayers, and though most of them must have been within hearing of the reader’s voice, a considerable proportion of the boys before him were neither listening nor evincing in their behaviour the slightest sign of reverence for the service in which they were engaged.

He was sorry to see that Tom Drift was laughing and whispering with his companions; entertaining them with an account of the way in which he had set the new “young un’s” watch to rights, and what a shave they had from being shut out from prayers. (Charlie wondered, as he noticed all this, whether, after all, he would have lost much good if that misfortune had happened.) And one or two boys were chewing toffee; at least, Charlie thought it must be toffee, their mouths were so brown, and they made such a noise over the process of mastication; some, with their hands in their pockets, were listlessly staring up at the roof; and some were reading books, anything but prayer-books, under the desk.