l never allow another gun, though.
Come and go as ye please. I'll not see you, and ye needn't see me. Ye've
been well brought up. Another glass of beer, now? I tell you a fisherman
he was and a fisherman he shall be to-night again. He shall! Wish
I could drown him. I'll convoy you to the Lodge. My people are not
precisely--ah--broke to boy, but they'll know you again."

He dismissed them with many compliments by the high Lodge-gate in the
split-oak park palings and they stood still; even Stalky, who had played
second, not to say a dumb, fiddle, regarding McTurk as one from another
world. The two glasses of strong home-brewed had brought a melancholy
upon the boy, for, slowly strolling with his hands in his pockets, he
crooned:--"Oh, Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that's goin' round?"

Under other circumstances Stalky and Beetle would have fallen upon him,
for that song was barred utterly--anathema--the sin of witchcraft. But
seeing what he had wrought, they danced round him in silence, waiting
till it pleased him to touch earth.

The tea-bell rang when they were still half a mile from College. McTurk
shivered and came out of dreams. The glory of his holiday estate had
left him. He was a Colleger of the College, speaking English once more.

"Turkey, it was immense!" said Stalky, generously. "I didn't know you
had it in you. You've got us a hut for the rest of the term, where
we simply _can't_ be collared. Fids! Fids! Oh, Fids! I gloat! Hear me
gloat!"

They spun wildly on their heels, jodeling after the accepted manner of
a "gloat," which is not unremotely allied to the primitive man's song of
triumph, and dropped down the hill by the path from the gasometer just
in time to meet their house-master, who had spent the afternoon watching
their abandoned hut in the "wuzzy."

Unluckily, all Mr. Prout's imagination leaned to the darker side of
life, and he looked on those young-eyed cherubims most sourly. Boys that
he understood attended house-matches and could be accounted for at
any moment. But he had heard McTurk openly deride cricket--even
house-matches; Beetle's views on the honor of the house he knew were
incendiary; and he could never tell when the soft and smiling Stalky was
laughing at him. Consequently--since human nature is what it is--those
boys had been doing wrong somewhere. He hoped it was nothing very
serious, but...

"_Ti-ra-ra-la-i-tu_! I gloat! Hear me!" Stalky, still on his heels,
whirled like