he were hard set with it. And all the time he was looking briskly from
my eyes to the fist I was clenching, and methought he tried to wink at
me in a covert manner; and then Peggy whisked her tail.

"Shall I fight, John?" I said at last; "I would an you had not come,
John."

"Chraist's will be done; I zim thee had better faight, Jan," he
answered, in a whisper, through the gridiron of the gate; "there be a
dale of faighting avore thee. Best wai to begin gude taime laike. Wull
the geatman latt me in, to zee as thee hast vair plai, lad?"

He looked doubtfully down at the colour of his cowskin boots, and the
mire upon the horses, for the sloughs were exceedingly mucky. Peggy,
indeed, my sorrel pony, being lighter of weight, was not crusted much
over the shoulders; but Smiler (our youngest sledder) had been well in
over his withers, and none would have deemed him a piebald, save of red
mire and black mire. The great blunderbuss, moreover, was choked with a
dollop of slough-cake; and John Fry's sad-coloured Sunday hat was indued
with a plume of marish-weed. All this I saw while he was dismounting,
heavily and wearily, lifting his leg from the saddle-cloth as if with a
sore crick in his back.

By this time the question of fighting was gone quite out of our
discretion; for sundry of the elder boys, grave and reverend signors,
who had taken no small pleasure in teaching our hands to fight, to ward,
to parry, to feign and counter, to lunge in the manner of sword-play,
and the weaker child to drop on one knee when no cunning of fence might
baffle the onset--these great masters of the art, who would far liefer
see us little ones practise it than themselves engage, six or seven of