“If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness,” rejoined Matey—­tellingly, his comrades thought.

“Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn.”

Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord Ormont had won.

“Excepting the duels,” Shalders had the impudence to say.

“If the cause is a good one!” cried Matey.

“The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the extremest degree.”  Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back with a bang.

“What was the cause, if you please, sir?” a boy, probably naughty, inquired; and as Shalders did not vouchsafe a reply, the bigger boys knew.

They revelled in the devilish halo of skirts on the whirl encircling Lord Ormont’s laurelled head.

That was a spark in their blood struck from a dislike of the tone assumed by Mr. Shalders to sustain his argument; with his “men are mortal,” and talk of a true living champion as “no chicken,” and the wordy drawl over “justification for calculating the approach of a close to a term of activity”—­in the case of a proved hero!

Guardians of boys should make sure that the boys are on their side before they raise the standard of virtue.  Nor ought they to summon morality for support of a polemic.  Matey Weyburn’s object of worship rode superior to a morality puffing its phrasy trumpet.  And, somehow, the sacrifice of an enormous number of women to Lord Ormont’s glory seemed natural; the very thing that should be, in the case of a first-rate military hero and commander—­Scipio notwithstanding.  It brightens his flame, and it is agreeable to them.  That is how they come to distinction:  they have no other chance; they are only women; they are mad to be singed, and they rush pelf-mall, all for the honour of the candle.

Shortly after this discussion Matey was heard informing some of the bigger fellows he could tell them positively that Lord Ormont’s age was under fifty-four—­the prime of manhood, and a jolly long way off death!  The greater credit to him, therefore, if he bad been a name in the world for anything like the period Shalders insinuated, “to get himself out of a sad quandary.”  Matey sounded the queer word so as to fix it sticking to the usher, calling him Mr. Peter Bell Shalders, at which the boys roared, and there was a question or two about names, which belonged to verses, for people caring to read poems.

To the joy of the school he displayed a greater knowledge of Murat than Shalders had:  named the different places in Europe where Lord Ormont and Murat were both springing to the saddle at the same time—­one a Marshal, the other a lieutenant; one a king, to be off his throne any day, the other a born English nobleman, seated firm as fate.  And he accused Murat of carelessness of his horses, ingratitude to his benefactor, circussy style.  Shalders went so far as to defend Murat for attending to the affairs of his kingdom, instead of galloping over hedges and ditches to swell Napoleon’s ranks in distress.  Matey listened to him there; he became grave; he nodded like a man saying, “I suppose we must examine it in earnest.”  The school was damped to hear him calling it a nice question.  Still, he said he thought he should have gone; and that settled it.