Nancy looked up at him mischievously:  ’The button-boy!  That’s what I call him, and I shan’t never call him anything else!’

Then the corporal’s voice rang out clear and loud,—­

‘Three cheers for the little button-boy !’ which was taken up enthusiastically by the soldiers, and Teddy hardly knew whether he was on his head or heels from excitement and delight.  But he had to pay a penalty for his prominent position.  From that day the title of the ‘button-boy’ stuck to him, and it became his nickname in the village by all who knew him.

On came the regiment, with the colours flying and the band playing in the most orthodox style, and Teddy was bitterly disappointed when the warning bell of school prevented him from marching along the road with them.

The schoolmaster was very lenient with the boys that morning, or else they would have been in dire disgrace, for lessons were imperfectly learned and said, and never had he found it so difficult to keep their attention.

But if Teddy was inattentive and careless at school, he was doubly troublesome at home, and for the next few days his mother’s fears were realised.  The excitement of all that had taken place seemed to have quite turned his head for the time.  He jumped on Kate Brown’s back—­the hired girl—­when she was carrying two pails of milk to the dairy, and the contents of both pails were spilt and wasted; he shut up a fighting bantam cock and the stable cat into a barn, and left them fighting furiously; he locked one of the farm-labourers in a hayloft, and pulled away the ladder, so that he was not released for hours, and he proved such an imp of mischief in the house that even his mother meditated handing him over to his uncle to be whipped.

At last it came to a climax in school.  He brought a lot of young frogs in a handkerchief, put some of them in the master’s desk, and amused himself at intervals by slipping the others down the backs of the boys seated in front of him.  His corner was the most unruly one in the room, and whilst waiting for another class to come down he began one of his stories in a whisper to a most interested audience.

’I went to see a goblin once that I heard of.  He lived in a tub on the seashore, and he lived by gobbling up schoolmasters and governesses.  He used to cut their hair off, scrape them well like a horse-radish, and then begin at their toes and gobble them up till he got to their heads—­their heads he boiled in a saucepan for soup.  The boys and girls used to bring their masters, when they didn’t—­’

‘Edward Platt!’

Never had the master’s voice sounded so stern.  The frogs were discovered!—­and his wrath was not appeased by seeing the cluster of heads round Teddy, and catching a few words of the delicious story going on.

Teddy started to his feet.

‘Who put these frogs here?’

‘I did, sir.’  The answer was boldly given.