Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and wondering, from the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he liked or hated him; it was easy to do either.

“It’s not really your turn to cane,” he said.

“I know it’s not,” said Comus, fingering a very serviceable-looking cane as lovingly as a pious violinist might handle his Strad.  “I gave Greyson some mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned or him, and I won.  He was rather decent over it and let me have half the chocolate back.”

The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such measure of popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not materially help to endear him to the succession of masters with whom he came in contact during the course of his schooldays.  He amused and interested such of them as had the saving grace of humour at their disposal, but if they sighed when he passed from their immediate responsibility it was a sigh of relief rather than of regret.  The more enlightened and experienced of them realised that he was something outside the scope of the things that they were called upon to deal with.  A man who has been trained to cope with storms, to foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself against a tornado.

Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger belief in their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had time permitted.

“I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your opportunities,” a form-master once remarked to a colleague whose House had the embarrassing distinction of numbering Comus among its inmates.

“Heaven forbid that I should try,” replied the housemaster.

“But why?” asked the reformer.

“Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements, and if you start in to tame the obviously untameable you are taking a fearful responsibility on yourself.”

“Nonsense; boys are Nature’s raw material.”

“Millions of boys are.  There are just a few, and Bassington is one of them, who are Nature’s highly finished product when they are in the schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding raw material, are quite helpless when we come in contact with them.”

“But what happens to them when they grow up?”

“They never do grow up,” said the housemaster; “that is their tragedy.  Bassington will certainly never grow out of his present stage.”

“Now you are talking in the language of Peter Pan,” said the form-master.

“I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan,” said the other.  “With all reverence for the author of that masterpiece I should say he had a wonderful and tender insight into the child mind and knew nothing whatever about boys.  To make only one criticism on that particular work, can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys of any country that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing children’s games in an underground cave when there were wolves and pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on the other side of the trap door?”