doing his verses on old letter-backs and odd scraps of paper, and learning his lessons no one knew how.  He never meddled with any little boy, and was popular with them, though they all looked on him with a sort of compassion, and called him “Poor Diggs,” not being able to resist appearances, or to disregard wholly even the sneers of their enemy Flashman.  However, he seemed equally indifferent to the sneers of big boys and the pity of small ones, and lived his own queer life with much apparent enjoyment to himself.  It is necessary to introduce Diggs thus particularly, as he not only did Tom and East good service in their present warfare, as is about to be told, but soon afterwards, when he got into the sixth, chose them for his fags, and excused them from study-fagging, thereby earning unto himself eternal gratitude from them and all who are interested in their history.

And seldom had small boys more need of a friend, for the morning after the siege the storm burst upon the rebels in all its violence.  Flashman laid wait, and caught Tom before second lesson, and receiving a point-blank “No” when told to fetch his hat, seized him and twisted his arm, and went through the other methods of torture in use.  “He couldn’t make me cry, though,” as Tom said triumphantly to the rest of the rebels; “and I kicked his shins well, I know.”  And soon it crept out that a lot of the fags were in league, and Flashman excited his associates to join him in bringing the young vagabonds to their senses; and the house was filled with constant chasings, and sieges, and lickings of all sorts; and in return, the bullies’ beds were pulled to pieces and drenched with water, and their names written up on the walls with every insulting epithet which the fag invention could furnish.  The war, in short, raged fiercely; but soon, as Diggs had told them, all the better fellows in the fifth gave up trying to fag them, and public feeling began to set against Flashman and his two or three intimates, and they were obliged to keep their doings more secret, but being thorough bad fellows, missed no opportunity of torturing in private.  Flashman was an adept in all ways, but above all in the power of saying cutting and cruel things, and could often bring tears to the eyes of boys in this way, which all the thrashings in the world wouldn’t have wrung from them.

And as his operations were being cut short in other directions, he now devoted himself chiefly to Tom and East, who lived at his own door, and would force himself into their study whenever he found a chance, and sit there, sometimes alone, and sometimes with a companion, interrupting all their work, and exulting in the evident pain which every now and then he could see he was inflicting on one or the other.

The storm had cleared the air for the rest of the house, and a better state of things now began than there had been since old Brooke had left; but an angry, dark spot of thunder-cloud still hung over the end of the passage where Flashman’s study and that of East and Tom lay.