His schoolfellows saw him no more; did not know, indeed, when he left them. Only one of them shook hands with him at the door of the old school as he went. That boy was Oliver Greenfield.
Chapter Thirty Eight.
Good-Bye to Saint Dominic’s.
And now, reader, we are at the end of our story, and there only remain the usual “last words” before we say good-bye.
Saint Dominic’s flourishes still, and only last season beat the County by five wickets! The captain on that occasion was a fellow called Stephen Greenfield, who carried his bat for forty-eight in the first innings. He is a big fellow, is the captain, and has got a moustache. Though he is the oldest boy at Saint Dominic’s, every one talks of him as “Greenfield junior.” He is vastly popular, and fellows say there never was such a good Sixth at the school since the days of his brother, Greenfield senior, five years ago. The captain is an object of special awe among the youngsters of the Fourth Junior, who positively quake in their shoes whenever his manly form appears in the upper corridor.
These youngsters, by the way, are still the liveliest section of Saint Dominic’s. The names Guinea-pig and Tadpole have died out, and left behind them only the Buttercups and Daisies, who, however, are as fierce rivals and as inky scamps as even their predecessors were. There is a lout of a fellow in the Fourth Senior called Bramble, who is extremely “down” on these juveniles, always snubbing them, and, along with one Padger, a friend of his, plotting to get them into trouble. But somehow they are not much afraid of Bramble, whereat Bramble is particularly furious, and summons Padger to a “meeting” about once a week in his study, there to take counsel against these irreverent Buttercups and Daisies.
About the only other fellow the reader will recollect is Paul, now in the Sixth, a steady-going sort of fellow, who, by the way, has just won the Nightingale Scholarship, greatly to the delight of his particular friend the captain.
Last year the Fifth tried to revive an old institution of their Form, in the shape of a newspaper entitled the Dominican, directed chiefly against the members of the Sixth. But somehow the undertaking did not come off. The Dominican was a very mild affair for one thing, and there was nothing amusing about it for another thing, and there was a good deal offensive about it for another thing; and for another thing, the captain ordered it to be taken down off the wall on the first day of its appearance, and announced that if he had any more of this nonsense he would thrash one or two whose names he mentioned, and knock one or two others out of the first eleven.