Captain Branscome's pay; but we were unprepared for the morning when,
on the stroke of the church clock--our Greenwich time--he walked up
to the door, resolutely handed Mrs. Stimcoe a letter, and as
resolutely walked away again. Stimcoe had been maudlin drunk for a
week and could not appear. His wife heroically stepped into the
breach, and gave us (as a geography lesson) some account of her uncle
the admiral and his career--"distinguished, but wandering," as she
summarized it.

I remember little of this lesson save that it dispensed--wisely, no
doubt--with the use of the terrestrial globe; that it included a
description of the admiral's country seat in Roscommon, and an
account of a ball given by him to celebrate Mrs. Stimcoe's arrival at
a marriageable age, with a list of the notabilities assembled; and
that it ended in her rapping Doggy Bates over the head with a ruler,
for biting his nails. From that moment anarchy reigned.

It reigned for a week. I have wondered since how our six day-boys
managed to refrain from carrying home a tale which must have brought
their parents down upon us _en masse_. Great is schoolboy honour--
great, and more than a trifle quaint. In any case, the parents must
have been singularly unobservant or singularly slow to reason upon
what they observed; for we sent their backward sons home to them each
night in a mask of ink.

Saturday came, and brought the usual half-holiday. We boarders
celebrated it by a raid upon the back yard of Rogerses--Bully Stokes
being temporarily incapacitated by chicken-pox--and possessed
ourselves, after a gallant fight, of Rogerses' football. Superior
numbers drove us back to our own door, where--at the invocation of