a hopeful young family of field-mice.  As nothing should be let to lie useless, it was well that the candle-box was thus occupied, for candles Martin never had.  A pound was issued to him weekly, as to the other boys; but as candles were available capital, and easily exchangeable for birds’ eggs or young birds, Martin’s pound invariably found its way in a few hours to Howlett’s the bird-fancier’s, in the Bilton road, who would give a hawk’s or nightingale’s egg or young linnet in exchange.  Martin’s ingenuity was therefore for ever on the rack to supply himself with a light.  Just now he had hit upon a grand invention, and the den was lighted by a flaring cotton wick issuing from a ginger-beer bottle full of some doleful composition.  When light altogether failed him, Martin would loaf about by the fires in the passages or hall, after the manner of Diggs, and try to do his verses or learn his lines by the firelight.

“Well, old boy, you haven’t got any sweeter in the den this half.  How that stuff in the bottle stinks!  Never mind; I ain’t going to stop; but you come up after prayers to our study.  You know young Arthur.  We’ve got Gray’s study.  We’ll have a good supper and talk about bird-nesting.”

Martin was evidently highly pleased at the invitation, and promised to be up without fail.

As soon as prayers were over, and the sixth and fifth form boys had withdrawn to the aristocratic seclusion of their own room, and the rest, or democracy, had sat down to their supper in the hall, Tom and Arthur, having secured their allowances of bread and cheese, started on their feet to catch the eye of the prepostor of the week, who remained in charge during supper, walking up and down the hall.  He happened to be an easy-going fellow, so they got a pleasant nod to their “Please may I go out?” and away they scrambled to prepare for Martin a sumptuous banquet.  This Tom had insisted on, for he was in great delight on the occasion, the reason of which delight must be expounded.  The fact was that this was the first attempt at a friendship of his own which Arthur had made, and Tom hailed it as a grand step.  The ease with which he himself became hail-fellow-well-met with anybody, and blundered into and out of twenty friendships a half-year, made him sometimes sorry and sometimes angry at Arthur’s reserve and loneliness.  True, Arthur was always pleasant, and even jolly, with any boys who came with Tom to their study; but Tom felt that it was only through him, as it were, that his chum associated with others, and that but for him Arthur would have been dwelling in a wilderness.  This increased his consciousness of responsibility; and though he hadn’t reasoned it out and made it clear to himself yet somehow he knew that this responsibility, this trust which he had taken on him without thinking about it, head over heels in fact, was the centre and turning-point of his school-life, that which was to make him or mar him, his appointed