"'It,'—well that is vague enough, but I suppose he means the happy event. Ye gods and little fishes!—to call a marriage 'it'! but that is like Boston. And 'sure to do something unlucky,' are you? Well, I guess you are not the 'Treacle' of old unless you get into some quandary over it," I muttered; and then I threw myself back in my chair and laughed again as some of our adventures, when we were at Dr. Omega's school—I mean college—presented themselves to my mind.
Glorious times those! looking back upon them now, although we did not value them, in our careless youth, at their full worth.
Treacle's—i.e., Boston's—daring always led him to some adventure, and I always backed him up—in a feeble way, perhaps,—and we always got found out somehow, and got our deserts in a manner more satisfactory to lovers of justice than to ourselves. Stunning times!
The very fact of our being punished for the same crime, and at the same time, was a bond of union between Treacle and myself.
"One touch of sympathy," or one touch of the rod, made us kin in a manner very peculiar;—a fellow feeling made us wondrous kind and sympathetic.
You talk of little dinners and little suppers in these days, and think them epicurean feasts!—but, be really hungry—hungry as a school-boy, and enjoy a little supper off kippered herring on the sly—that is a feast, if you like. Such feasts as these we enjoyed at Mother Kemp's, down the village, when the Doctor, tutors, and monitors imagined us safely tucked in our little beds.
Looking upon Mother Kemp, in those days, I thought her a good fairy disguised as a witch. Looking back upon her, with manhood's enlightened judgment, I think she was an unprincipled old woman, who traded on our weaknesses. I confess myself to have been a hungry boy,—Boston, with a penitence which did him credit, used to confess the same: we both had a propensity to come through our trouser-legs and sleeve-jackets, and, what was worse, could not help ourselves doing so.
Boston was of an ingenious turn of mind, and it was he who suggested that those boys, who could afford to be hungry with any satisfaction to themselves, should club together for a supper at Mother Kemp's once a-week; and it was through one of these suppers, or the search for one, that he got his sweet sobriquet of "Treacle."
He having made the suggestion, we elected him chief of our expeditions, and thus to a certain extent he held the fate of our appetites in his hands.
One night we had escaped, as usual, by means of a rope-ladder made by Boston, from the window of the room of which I was senior boy, to Mother Kemp's in the village.