Profuse promises from all, especially East.

“Mind, I don’t ask questions,” went on Mentor, “but I rather think some of you have been there before this after his chickens.  Now, knocking over other people’s chickens, and running off with them, is stealing.  It’s a nasty word, but that’s the plain English of it.  If the chickens were dead and lying in a shop, you wouldn’t take them, I know that, any more than you would apples out of Griffith’s basket; but there’s no real difference between chickens running about and apples on a tree, and the same articles in a shop.  I wish our morals were sounder in such matters.  There’s nothing so mischievous as these school distinctions, which jumble up right and wrong, and justify things in us for which poor boys would be sent to prison.”  And good old Holmes delivered his soul on the walk home of many wise sayings, and, as the song says,

     “Gee’d ’em a sight of good advice;”

which same sermon sank into them all, more or less, and very penitent they were for several hours.  But truth compels me to admit that East, at any rate, forgot it all in a week, but remembered the insult which had been put upon him by Farmer Thompson, and with the Tadpole and other hair-brained youngsters committed a raid on the barn soon afterwards, in which they were caught by the shepherds and severely handled, besides having to pay eight shillings—­all the money they had in the world—­to escape being taken up to the Doctor.

Martin became a constant inmate in the joint study from this time, and Arthur took to him so kindly that Tom couldn’t resist slight fits of jealousy, which, however, he managed to keep to himself.  The kestrel’s eggs had not been broken, strange to say, and formed the nucleus of Arthur’s collection, at which Martin worked heart and soul, and introduced Arthur to Howlett the bird-fancier, and instructed him in the rudiments of the art of stuffing.  In token of his gratitude, Arthur allowed Martin to tattoo a small anchor on one of his wrists; which decoration, however, he carefully concealed from Tom.  Before the end of the half-year he had trained into a bold climber and good runner, and, as Martin had foretold, knew twice as much about trees, birds, flowers, and many other things, as our good-hearted and facetious young friend Harry East.

CHAPTER V—­THE FIGHT: 

     “Surgebat Macnevisius
     Et mox jactabat ultro,
     Pugnabo tua gratia
     Feroci hoc Mactwoltro.”—­Etonian.

There is a certain sort of fellow—­we who are used to studying boys all know him well enough—­of whom you can predicate with almost positive certainty, after he has been a month at school, that he is sure to have a fight, and with almost equal certainty that he will have but one.  Tom Brown was one of these; and as it is our well-weighed intention to give a full, true, and correct account of Tom’s only single combat with a school-fellow in the manner of our old friend Bell’s Life, let those young persons whose stomachs are not strong, or who think a good set-to with the weapons which God has given us all an uncivilized, unchristian, or ungentlemanly affair, just skip this chapter at once, for it won’t be to their taste.