Ludvig Veyergang, with his sealskin satchel on his back, had already travelled this road for several years.  He had been nicknamed the Ostrich, because of his little head with the bird-like nose, his long bare neck, and the way he walked.  When he met Nikolai, he pretended not to know him, and Nikolai whistled and clattered with his shoes on the pavement.

The board school’s new slide ran along the gutter a good way out into the grammar school street.  It was the product of the joint work of many for a whole week, and fate willed that Nikolai, at the head of a string of comrades, should come full speed down it, hallooing and shouting, just as Ludvig Veyergang and a few others came round the corner.  Young Veyergang received a push that made him drop his pencil-case; and pens, lead and slate pencils lay strewn over the ground.

“Pick them up, you beggar!” he cried to Nikolai, for it was he who had knocked up against him.  “I shall tell about you at home, you may be pretty sure.  Pick them up, or—­”

A kick sent a few loose lumps of snow in answer.

“You shall be made to bend soon enough, if that’s what you want.  Father shall be told, this very day, that you are the leader of the street cads in the town; and if no one else will tell your mother about it, I’ll tell her myself, however much she cries!”

“Do you want to have your ostrich-beak pulled?”

“You’d better try it on!  Perhaps you don’t know that we pay for you at the blockmaker’s.  But I’ll take care that you get thrashed until you beg my pardon:  a fellow who doesn’t even know who his father is, and his mother only wishes he had never been born!”

The last words were hardly out of his mouth when Nikolai sprang upon him with both fists like a pair of sledge-hammers, and for a few blissful seconds hammered out every trace of difference in birth and position.  Now he should feel “both his father and his mother!”

It was one of the board school’s memorable and famous days, when the wine was tapped from Ludvig Veyergang’s nose in the snow; and even the next day at dinner-time, two or three school classes of interested spectators were searching for traces of red spots in the snow by the lamp-post.

But, though he enjoyed great honour and admiration during the whole afternoon at school, Nikolai knew that at home he would meet with an utterly different interpretation of the event, news of which the Holmans must already have received, surely and promptly, from the Veyergangs.

As he neared home, he went slower and slower.  The thought of what might await him, made his feet grow heavier and heavier, and when he had separated from his last companion, he suddenly stopped and turned down by the chandler’s, where the street led away from, and not towards his home.

* * * * *

It was now the third night Nikolai had been away, explained Mrs. Holman to the policeman outside; and it was not much wonder if he expected the reward he deserved, and felt his back smart.  Lay hands on better people’s children!  And the son of Consul Veyergang, his own benefactor, too!