The schoolmaster was very lenient with the boys that morning, or else
they would have been in dire disgrace, for lessons were imperfectly
learned and said, and never had he found it so difficult to keep their
attention.

But if Teddy was inattentive and careless at school, he was doubly
troublesome at home, and for the next few days his mother's fears were
realised. The excitement of all that had taken place seemed to have quite
turned his head for the time. He jumped on Kate Brown's back--the hired
girl--when she was carrying two pails of milk to the dairy, and the
contents of both pails were spilt and wasted; he shut up a fighting
bantam cock and the stable cat into a barn, and left them fighting
furiously; he locked one of the farm-labourers in a hayloft, and pulled
away the ladder, so that he was not released for hours, and he proved
such an imp of mischief in the house that even his mother meditated
handing him over to his uncle to be whipped.

At last it came to a climax in school. He brought a lot of young frogs
in a handkerchief, put some of them in the master's desk, and amused
himself at intervals by slipping the others down the backs of the boys
seated in front of him. His corner was the most unruly one in the room,
and whilst waiting for another class to come down he began one of his
stories in a whisper to a most interested audience.

'I went to see a goblin once that I heard of. He lived in a tub on the
seashore, and he lived by gobbling up schoolmasters and governesses. He
used to cut their hair off, scrape them well like a horse-radish, and
then begin at their toes and gobble them up till he got to their
heads--their heads he boiled in a saucepan for soup. The boys and girls