“But that was the reason the pudding came to grief,” continued Crayshaw; “they were very large and fierce, and in my terror I let it fall, and it was squashed.  When I saw their friends coming on to fall upon it, I was just about to cry, ‘Take it all, but spare my life!’ when Barbara came and rescued me.  I hope,” he went on, yet more meekly, “I hope it was not an unholy self-love that prompted me to prefer my life to the pudding!”

The children laughed, as they generally did when Crayshaw spoke, but it was more at his manner than at his words.  And now, peace being restored, everybody helped everybody else to the delicacies, John discreetly refraining from any inquiry as to whether this was the first midnight feast over which his son had presided, but he could not forbear to say, “I suppose your grandfather’s ‘tip’ is to blame for this?”

“If everybody was like the Grand,” remarked Crayshaw, “Tennyson never need have said—­

     “’Vex not thou the schoolboy’s soul
     With thy shabby tip.’”

“Now, Cray,” said Brandon, “don’t you emulate Valentine’s abominable trick of quoting.”

“And I have often begged you two not to parody the Immortals,” said John.  “The small fry you may make fun of, if you please, but let the great alone.”

“But he ithn’t dead,” reasoned Master Augustus John; “I don’t call any of thoth fellowth immortal till they’re dead.”

“It’s a very bad habit,” continued his father.

“And he’s made me almost as bad as himself,” observed Crayshaw in the softest and mildest of tones.  “Miss Christie said this very morning that there was no bearing me, and I never did it till I knew him.  I used to be so good, everybody loved me.”

John laughed, but was determined to say his say.

“You never can take real pleasure again in any poetry that you have mauled in that manner.  Miss Crampton was seriously annoyed when she found that you had altered the girl’s songs, and made them ridiculous.”

The last time, in fact, that Johnnie and Crayshaw had been together, they had deprived themselves of their natural rest in order to carry out these changes; and the first time Miss Crampton gave a music lesson after their departure, she opened the book at one of their improved versions, which ran as follows:—­

     “Wink to me only with thy nose,
     And I will sing through mine.”

Miss Crampton hated boyish vulgarity; she turned the page, but matters were no better.  The two youths had next been at work on a song in which a muff of a man, who offers nothing particular in return, requests ‘Nancy’ to gang wi’ him, leaving her home, her dinner, her brooches, her best gowns, &c., behind, to walk through snow-drifts, blasts, and other perils by his side, and afterwards strew flowers on his clay.  Desirous as it seemed to show that the young person was not so misguided as her silence has hitherto left the world to think, they had added a verse, which ran as follows:—­