’I can’t stand being prayed at, morning and evening, by a fellow who hasn’t the pluck to strike me like a man,’ he said.  Mr. Rippenger had the habit of signalizing offenders, in his public prayers, as boys whose hearts he wished to be turned from callousness.  He perpetually suspected plots; and to hear him allude to some deep, long-hatched school conspiracy while we knelt motionless on the forms, and fetch a big breath to bring out, ’May the heart of Walter Heriot be turned and he comprehend the multitudinous blessings,’ etc., was intensely distressing.  Together with Walter Heriot, Andrew Saddlebank, our best bowler, the drollest fellow in the world, John Salter, and little Gus Temple, were oftenest cited.  They declared that they invariably uttered ‘Amen,’ as Heriot did, but we none of us heard this defiant murmur of assent from their lips.  Heriot pronounced it clearly and cheerfully, causing Julia’s figure to shrink as she knelt with her face in the chair hard by her father’s desk-pulpit.  I received the hearty congratulations of my comrades for singing out ‘Amen’ louder than Heriot, like a chorister, though not in so prolonged a note, on hearing to my stupefaction Mr. Rippenger implore that the heart of ‘him we know as Richmond Roy’ might be turned.  I did it spontaneously.  Mr. Rippenger gazed at me in descending from his desk; Julia, too, looking grieved.  For my part, I exulted in having done a thing that gave me a likeness to Heriot.

‘Little Richmond, you’re a little hero,’ he said, caressing me.  ’I saw old Rippenger whisper to that beast, Boddy.  Never mind; they won’t hurt you as long as I’m here.  Grow tough, that’s what you’ve got to do.  I’d like to see you horsed, only to see whether you’re game to take it without wincing—­if it didn’t hurt you much, little lad.’

He hugged me up to him.

‘I’d take anything for you, Heriot,’ said I.

‘All right,’ he answered, never meaning me to suffer on his account.  He had an inimitable manner of sweet speaking that endeared him to younger boys capable of appreciating it, with the supernatural power of music.  It endeared him, I suppose, to young women also.  Julia repeated his phrases, as for instance, ‘Silly boy, silly boy,’ spoken with a wave of his hand, when a little fellow thanked him for a kindness.  She was angry at his approval of what she called my defiance of her father, and insisted that I was the catspaw of one of Heriot’s plots to vex him.  ’Tell Heriot you have my command to say you belong to me and must not be misled,’ she said.  His answer was that he wanted it in writing.  She requested him to deliver up her previous letters.  Thereupon he charged me with a lengthy epistle, which plunged us into boiling water.  Mr. Boddy sat in the schoolroom while Heriot’s pen was at work, on the wet Sunday afternoon.  His keen little eyes were busy in his flat bird’s head all the time Heriot continued writing.  He saw no more than that Heriot gave me a book; but as I was marching away to Julia he called to know where I was going.