"Between you and me and the gatepost, eh?" he asked.

His hand went down and tapped his pocket slily, and with that he
turned and shuffled away down the street. I stared after him into
the foggy darkness, listening to the tap of his stick upon the
cobbles.



CHAPTER IV.


CAPTAIN COFFIN STUDIES NAVIGATION.

Events soon to be narrated made my sojourn in tutelage of Mr. Stimcoe
a brief one, and I will pass it lightly over.

The school consisted of four boarders and six backward sons of
gentlemen resident in the town, and assembled daily in a large
outhouse furnished with desks of a peculiar pattern, known to us as
"scobs." Mr. Stimcoe, who had received his education as a
"querister" at Winchester (and afterwards as a "servitor" at Pembroke
College, Oxford), habitually employed and taught us to employ the
esoteric slang--or "notions," as he called it--of that great public
school; so that in "preces," "morning lines," "book-chambers," and
what-not we had the names if not the things, and a vague and quite
illusory sense of high connection, on the strength of which, and of
our freedom from what Mrs. Stimcoe called "the commercial taint," we
made bold to despise the more prosperous Rogerses up the hill.