I held out as well as I could.  I made no complaint, and kept my temper.  I must say that Henrietta behaved uncommonly well to me at this time.

“After all, you know, Charlie,” she said, “you’ve not done anything really wrong or dishonourable.”  This was true, and it comforted me.

Except Henrietta, I really had not a friend; for Rupert was angry with me, and the holding up at school only made me feel worse at home.

At last the joke began to die out, and I was getting on very well, but for one boy, a heavy-looking fellow with a pasty face, who was always creeping after me, and asking me to tell him about my father.  “Johnson Minor,” we called him.  He was a younger brother of Thomas Johnson, the champion of the code of honour.

He was older than I, but he was below me in class, and though he was bigger, he was not a very great deal bigger; and if there is any truth in the stories I have so often told, our family has been used to fight against odds for many generations.

I thought about this a good deal, and measured Johnson Minor with my eye.  At last I got Henrietta to wrestle and box with me for practice.

She was always willing to do anything Tomboyish, indeed she was generally willing to do anything one wanted, and her biceps were as hard as mine, for I pinched them to see.  We got two pairs of gloves, much too big for us, and stuffed cotton wool in to make them like boxing-gloves, as we used to stuff out the buff-coloured waistcoat when we acted old gentlemen in it.  But it did not do much good; for I did not like to hurt Henrietta when I got a chance, and I do not think she liked to hurt me.  So I took to dumb-belling every morning in my night-shirt; and at last I determined I would have it out with Johnson Minor, once for all.

One afternoon, when the boys had been very friendly with me, and were going to have me in the paper chase on Saturday, he came up in the old way and began asking me about my father, quite gravely, like a sort of poor imitation of Weston.  So I turned round and said, “Whatever my father was—­he’s dead.  Your father’s alive, Johnson, and if you weren’t a coward, you wouldn’t go on bullying a fellow who hasn’t got one.”

“I’m a coward, am I, Master Honourable?” said Johnson, turning scarlet, and at the word Honourable I thought he had broken my nose.  I never felt such pain in my life, but it was the only pain I felt on the occasion; afterwards I was much too much excited, I am sorry that I cannot remember very clearly about it, which I should have liked to do, as it was my first fight.

There was no time to fight properly.  I was obliged to do the best I could.  I made a sort of rough plan in my head, that I would cling to Johnson as long as I was able, and hit him whenever I got a chance.  I did not quite know when he was hitting me from when I was hitting him; but I know that I held on, and that the ground seemed to be always hitting us both.