"Can you tell me where the lists are for football? I ought to have been
playing yesterday only I didn't know where to look."

The slow boy smiled. "I'm going to look myself," he said, "come on."

And then two things happened. First sauntering down the playground there
came a boy whom Peter had noticed on that first morning in school--some one
very little older than Peter and not very much bigger, but with a grace,
a dignity, an air that was very wonderful indeed. He was a dark boy with
his hair carelessly tossed over his forehead; he was very clean and he had
beautiful hands. To Peter's rough and clumsy figure he seemed everything
that a boy should be, and, in his mind, he had called him "Steerforth." As
this boy approached there suddenly burst into view a discordant crowd with
some one in their midst. They were shouting and laughing, and Peter could
hear that some one was crying. The crowd separated and formed a ring and
danced shouting round a very small and chubby boy who was standing crying
quite desperately, with his head buried in his arm. Every now and then the
infant was knocked by one boy in the ring into another boy's arms, and so
was tossed from side to side.

The hopeless sound of the chubby one's crying caused Peter suddenly to
go red hot somewhere inside his chest, and like a bullet from a gun he
was into the middle of the circle. "You beasts! You beasts," he sobbed
hysterically. He began to hit wildly, with his head down, at any one
near him, and very soon there was a glorious melee. The crowd roared
with laughter as they flung the two small boys against one another, then
suddenly one of the circle got a wild blow in the eye from Peter's fist and
went staggering back, another was kicked in the shins, a third was badly
winded. Peter had lost all sense of place or time, of reason or sanity; he