Boys will quarrel, and when they quarrel will sometimes fight.  Fighting with fists is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels.  What substitute for it is there, or ever was there, amongst any nation under the sun?  What would you like to see take its place?

Learn to box, then, as you learn to play cricket and football.  Not one of you will be the worse, but very much the better, for learning to box well.  Should you never have to use it in earnest, there’s no exercise in the world so good for the temper and for the muscles of the back and legs.

As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means.  When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say “Yes” or “No” to a challenge to fight, say “No” if you can—­only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say “No.”  It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives.  It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger.  But don’t say “No” because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest.  And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.

CHAPTER VI—­FEVER IN THE SCHOOL.

     “This our hope for all that’s mortal
     And we too shall burst the bond;
     Death keeps watch beside the portal,
     But ’tis life that dwells beyond.” 
     —­John sterling.

Two years have passed since the events recorded in the last chapter, and the end of the summer half-year is again drawing on.  Martin has left and gone on a cruise in the South Pacific, in one of his uncle’s ships; the old magpie, as disreputable as ever, his last bequest to Arthur, lives in the joint study.  Arthur is nearly sixteen, and at the head of the twenty, having gone up the school at the rate of a form a half-year.  East and Tom have been much more deliberate in their progress, and are only a little way up the fifth form.  Great strapping boys they are, but still thorough boys, filling about the same place in the house that young Brooke filled when they were new boys, and much the same sort of fellows.  Constant intercourse with Arthur has done much for both of them, especially for Tom; but much remains yet to be done, if they are to get all the good out of Rugby which is to be got there in these times.  Arthur is still frail and delicate, with more spirit than body; but, thanks to his intimacy with them and Martin, has learned to swim, and run, and play cricket, and has never hurt himself by too much reading.

One evening, as they were all sitting down to supper in the fifth-form room, some one started a report that a fever had broken out at one of the boarding-houses.  “They say,” he added, “that Thompson is very ill, and that Dr. Robertson has been sent for from Northampton.”

“Then we shall all be sent home,” cried another.  “Hurrah! five weeks’ extra holidays, and no fifth-form examination!”