“She had nothing to do with it,” asseverated Allen, “she was as good as gold—-”

“Ah!  I knew he wasn’t figged out for nothing,” put in Jock.

“Don’t be ashamed, Ali, my boy,” added Bobus.  “We all understand her little tokens.”

“Stop that!” cried Allen, catching hold of Jock’s ear so as to end his war-dance in a howl, bringing the ponderous Rob to the rescue, and there was a general melee, ending by all the five rolling promiscuously on the gravel drive.  They scrambled up with recovered tempers, and at the sight of an indignant housemaid rushed in a general stampede to the two large attics opening into one another, which served as the lair of the Folly lads.  There, while struggling, with Jock’s assistance, to pull off his boots, Allen explained how he had been waylaid “by a beast in velveteens,” and walked off to the nearest gate.

“Will he summons you, Ali?  We’ll all go and see the Grand Turk in the dock,” cried Jock.

“Don’t flatter yourself; he wouldn’t think of it.”

“How much did you fork out?” asked Bobus.

Allen declaimed in the last refinement of Eton slang (carefully treasured up by the others for reproduction) against the spite of the keeper, who he declared had grinned with malice as he turned him out at a little back gate into a lane with a high stone wall on each side, and two ruts running like torrents with water, leading in the opposite direction to Kenminster, and ending in a bottom where he was up to the ankles in red clay.

“The Eton boots, oh my!” cried Jock, falling backwards with one of them, which he had just pulled off.

“And then,” added Allen, “as I tried to get along under the wall by the bank, what should a miserable stone do, but turn round with me and send me squash into the mud and mire, floundering like a hippopotamus.  I should like to get damages from that villain!  I should!”

Allen was much more angry than was usual with him, and the others, though laughing at his Etonian airs, fully sympathised with his wrath.

“He ought to be served out.”

“We will serve him out!”

“How?”

“Get all our fellows and make a jolly good row under his windows,” said Robin.

“Decidedly low,” said Allen.

“And impracticable besides,” said Bobus.  “They’d kick you out before you could say Jack Robinson.”

“There was an old book of father’s,” suggested Jock, “with an old scamp who starved and licked his apprentices, till one of them dressed himself up in a bullock’s hide, horns and hoofs, and tail and all, and stood over his bed at night and shouted—-

     “’Old man, old man, for thy cruelty,
       Body and soul thou art given to me;
       Let me but hear those apprentices’ cries,
       And I’ll toss thee, and gore thee, and bore out thine eyes.’

And he was quite mild to the apprentices ever after.’”