om in
his gratitude. The latter looked very wise and very condescending--as
had he not a right?--and, handing me back to my master, said, with the
air of a physician prescribing a course of treatment for a convalescent
patient,--

"You'd better shove him on to the right time, and then keep him quiet,
young un."

This Charlie did, and it would be hard to say which of us two was the
happier at that moment.

I had scarcely been deposited once more into my accustomed pocket, when
a loud bell sounded down the corridors, and made Tom Drift jump as if he
had been shot.

"I say, that's the prayer-bell! Come on! unless you want to get into a
jolly row."

And without further words he seized the astonished Charlie by the arm,
and ran with him at full speed along one or two empty passages, dashing
at last in through a big door, which was in the very act of closing as
the two reached it.

Charlie was so confused, and so out of breath with this astonishing and
frantic race, that for a minute he did not know whether he was standing
on his head or his heels.

There was, however, no time for solving the problem just then, for Tom
Drift, still retaining his grasp on his arm, dragged him forward,
whispering,--

"This way; wasn't that a close shave? Get in here, and don't make a
noise."

Charlie obeyed, and found himself in a pew, one of a congregation of
some two hundred boys, assembled in the school chapel for evening
prayers. At the far end of the chapel he could hear a man's voice,
reading; but what it said it was impossible for him to make out, owing
to the talking that was going on around him.

He looked eagerly and curiously down the long rows of his new
schoolfellows, feeling half afraid at the sight of so many new faces,
and half proud of being a Randlebury boy, with a right to a seat in the
chapel. And as he looked he saw some faces he thought he should like,
and some that he thought he would dislike; there were merry, bright-eyed
boys, like himself, and there were ill-tempered, sullen-looking boys;
there were boys haggard with hard-reading, and boys who looked as if
their heads were altogether empty.

But what puzzled and troubled Charlie not a little was to notice, that
though the school was supposed to be at prayers, and though most of them
must have been within hearing of the reader's voice, a considerable
proportion of the boys before him were neither listening nor evincing in
their behaviour the slight