Prescriptive rights, in short, grow faster than pumpkins, which is amongst the many warnings life affords us to be just as well as generous.  Thence it had come about that the young roughs of the village regarded our pond to all winter intents and purposes as theirs, and my father as only so far and so objectionably concerned in the matter that he gave John Binder a yearly job in patching up the wall which it took them three months’ trouble to kick a breach in.

Our neighbours were what is called “very independent” folk.  In the grown-up people this was modified by the fact that no one who has to earn his own livelihood can be quite independent of other people; if he would live he must let live, and throw a little civility into the bargain.  But boys of an age when their parents found meals and hobnailed boots for them whether they behaved well or ill, were able to display independence in its roughest form.  And when the boys of our neighbourhood were rough, they were very rough indeed.

The village boys had their Christmas holidays about the same time that we had ours, which left them as much spare time for sliding and skating as we had, but they had their dinner at twelve o’clock, whilst we had ours at one, so that any young roughs who wished to damage our pond were just comfortably beginning their mischief as Jem and I were saying grace before meat, and the thought of it took away our appetites again and again.

That winter they were particularly aggravating.  The December frost was a very imperfect one, and the mill-dam never bore properly, so the boys swarmed over our pond, which was shallow and safe.  Very few of them could even hobble on skates, and those few carried the art no farther than by cutting up the slides.  But thaw came on, so that there was no sliding, and then the young roughs amused themselves with stamping holes in the soft ice with their hobnailed heels.  When word came to us that they were taking the stones off our wall and pitching them down on to the soft ice below, to act as skaters’ stumbling-blocks for the rest of that hard winter which we expected, Jem’s indignation was not greater than mine.  My father was not at home, and indeed, when we had complained before, he rather snubbed us, and said that we could not want the whole of the pond to ourselves, and that he had always lived quietly with his neighbours and we must learn to do the same, and so forth.  No action at all calculated to assuage our thirst for revenge was likely to be taken by him, so Jem and I held a council by Charlie’s sofa, and it was a council of war.  At the end we all three solemnly shook hands, and Charlie was left to write and despatch brief notes of summons to our more distant school-mates, whilst Jem and I tucked up our trousers, wound our comforters sternly round our throats, and went forth in different directions to gather the rest.

(Having lately been reading about the Highlanders, who used to send round a fiery cross when the clans were called to battle, I should have liked to do so in this instance; but as some of the Academy boys were no greater readers than Jem, they might not have known what it meant, so we abandoned the notion.)