It was not at all usual in those days for two school-house boys to have a fight.  Of course there were exceptions, when some cross-grained, hard-headed fellow came up, who would never be happy unless he was quarreling with his nearest neighbors, or when there was some class-dispute between the fifth-form and the fags, for instance, which required blood-letting; and a champion was picked out on each side tacitly, who settled the matter by a good, hearty mill.  But for the most part the constant use of those surest keepers of the peace, the boxing-gloves, kept the school-house boys from fighting one another.  Two or three nights in every week the gloves were brought out, either in the hall or fifth-form room; and every boy who was ever likely to fight at all, knew all his neighbors’ prowess perfectly well, and could tell to a nicety what chance he would have in a stand-up fight with any other boy in the house.  But of course no such experience could be gotten as regarded boys in other houses; and as most of the other houses were more or less jealous of the school-house, collisions were frequent.

After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know?  From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man.  Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.

It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting.  Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts.  Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere.  The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be.  I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and the wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.  So having recorded, and being about to record, my hero’s fights of all sorts, with all sorts of enemies, I shall now proceed to give an account of his passage-at-arms with the only one of his school-fellows whom he ever had to encounter in this manner.

It was drawing toward the close of Arthur’s first half-year, and the May evenings were lengthening out.  Locking-up was not till eight o’clock, and everybody was beginning to talk about what he would do in the holidays.  The shell,[6] in which form all our dramatis personae now are, were reading among other things the last book of “Homer’s Iliad,” and had worked through it as far as the speeches of the women over Hector’s body.  It is a whole school-day, and four or five of the school-house boys (among whom are Arthur, Tom and East) are preparing third lesson together.  They have finished the regulation forty lines, and are for the most part getting very tired, notwithstanding the exquisite pathos of Helen’s lamentation.  And now several long four-syllabled words come together, and the boy with the dictionary strikes work.