"Pay your debts before you go," said a monitor, striding up to me, after
hearing how the honour lay; "Ridd, you must go through with it."

"Fight, for the sake of the junior first," cried the little fellow in my
ear, the clever one, the head of our class, who had mocked John Fry, and
knew all about the aorists, and tried to make me know it; but I never
went more than three places up, and then it was an accident, and I came
down after dinner. The boys were urgent round me to fight, though my
stomach was not up for it; and being very slow of wit (which is not
chargeable on me), I looked from one to other of them, seeking any cure
for it. Not that I was afraid of fighting, for now I had been three
years at Blundell's, and foughten, all that time, a fight at least once
every week, till the boys began to know me; only that the load on my
heart was not sprightly as of the hay-field. It is a very sad thing to
dwell on; but even now, in my time of wisdom, I doubt it is a fond thing
to imagine, and a motherly to insist upon, that boys can do without
fighting. Unless they be very good boys, and afraid of one another.

"Nay," I said, with my back against the wrought-iron stay of the gate,
which was socketed into Cop's house-front: "I will not fight thee now,
Robin Snell, but wait till I come back again."

"Take coward's blow, Jack Ridd, then," cried half a dozen little boys,
shoving Bob Snell forward to do it; because they all knew well enough,
having striven with me ere now, and proved me to be their master--they
knew, I say, that without great change, I would never accept that
contumely. But I took little heed of them, looking in dull wonderment
at John Fry, and Smiler, and the blunderbuss, and Peggy. John Fry was
scratching his head, I could see, and getting blue in the face, by the
light from Cop's parlour-window, and going to and fro upon Smiler, as if