He quaffed a deep draught and leaned back in his chair, giving me another friendly wink.  The captain was ever somewhat long winded over his stories, and I could see that my father was growing impatient; but he sat back in his chair with his hands upon the arms and said never a word.

“Young Cludde and Cyrus Vetch, it seems, have a sweet tooth for your apples, Ellery,” said the captain, “and Cludde told me with a fine indignation that Humphrey flatly refused to fill his pockets for their behoof.  They were proceeding to enforce their requisition, I gather, when the boy broke from them, and, finding himself hard pressed by and by, took refuge behind Joe Punchard’s bandy legs.  And Joe must needs take up the cudgels on behalf of the oppressed, and chose an original way of punishing the oppressor.  And thus the rolling of the barrel is explained.”

At this Mistress Pennyquick broke out into vehement denunciation of the two boys, but my father silenced her.  Quietly he began to question me:  he would take no denial, and drew out of me bit by bit the whole story of the bullying I had suffered from those two of my schoolfellows.

And then he was more angry than I had seen him ever before.  He smote the arm of the chair with his great fist, and vowed he would not have me ill used; and though he said but little, and never once raised his voice, I knew by the set of his lips and the gleam of his eye that it would go hard with anyone who baited me again.  Then the captain made a proposition for which I have been thankful all my life long.

“The moral of it is, Ellery, that Humphrey must be a pupil of mine.

“Give me your arm, boy.

“Ah!” says he, feeling the muscle, which was soft enough, no doubt, seeing that I was only eleven and had never done anything about the farm.  “We must alter that.  Let him come to me twice a week, Ellery, and he shall learn the arts of self defense, first with nature’s own weapons, for boxing I take to be the true foundation of all bodily exercise, and afterwards, when he is a little grown, the more delicate science of swordsmanship, which demands bodily strength and wits, and to which the other is but a prelude.  And I warrant you, if he have the right stuff in him, that by the time the schoolmaster has done with him he shall be able to hold his own against any man, and will need no succors from Joe Punchard or anyone else.”

Hereupon Mistress Pennyquick set up a cry about the wickedness of teaching little boys to fight, and the state she would be in if I was some day brought home mangled and disfigured, and a great deal more to the same effect.  The captain tapped the table until she had finished, and then, with a fine courtly bow, he said: 

“Spoken like a woman, ma’am.  Humphrey will suffer hard knocks, to be sure; yes, please God, he shall have many a black eye, and many a bloody nose, and we shall make a man of him, ma’am:  a gentleman he is already.”