ad slowly round towards the boys, and squinted so horribly that her
eyes half disappeared beneath the bridge of her nose, and Tommy Sullins,
a very wild, excitable little boy, forgot his awe of Mr Samuel Chute,
and burst into a loud "Ha, ha, ha!"

"Sullins!" shouted Mr Chute; and Feelier was gazing wonderingly at the
boy with her eyes in their normal, position, as the little fellow became
perfectly snail-like in his action, and crept back into the very stiff
long pinafore he was wearing.

Then bob, bob, bob, bob went the girls as they passed Mr William Forth
Burge, who came out of the gate as the last pair passed and smiled his
way up to his sister, who was toddling along beside Hazel Thorne, and
making Mr Samuel Chute feel annoyed, for he was obliged to leave some
little space before starting his boys; and then as he had always been in
the habit of walking last, it would have looked peculiar to walk in
front. Besides which there would have been the risk of little boys
straggling behind, and perhaps not appearing in church at all; so, in
spite of an intense desire, freshly developed, to keep near the new
schoolmistress, he was compelled to walk at a distance of twenty-two
doubled boys behind, and this made him metaphorically gnash his teeth.

Mr Chute's way of gnashing his teeth was, paradoxical as it may sound,
with his hands, upon which he wore a pair of brand new kid gloves,
bought late on Saturday night expressly to impress the new mistress.
These hands seemed to have been suddenly seized with an angry itching to
seize little boys' arms and shoulders, to give them nips and shakes and
pushes for not walking better than they did; and the severe drilling he
gave them as he walked backwards and forwards along the semi-military
column made the boys stare. But it was upon Master Sullins that the
vials of his wrath threatened to be emptied. He could not forgive that
laugh. What, he asked himself, would Miss Thorne think? It was
terrible, and seemed to him like the first step towards blasting the
hopes that had already begun to bud after seeing the new mistress only
twice. The consequence was, that whenever he told himself never had the
boys walked to church so badly before, he glanced at Tommy Sullins, and
when he glanced at Tommy Sullins, he thought of a certain length of that
thin rattan or _rotan_ cane that grows so beautifully in the Malay
Peninsula, running up and down trees in festoons for two or three
hundre