onary state
and take their rank among the public schoolboys of the land.

Such being the case, it is little wonder they looked fidgety as they
caught their last glimpse of Mr Ashford, and realised that before they
came in sight of Mountjoy again a crisis in the lives of each of them
would have come and gone.

"Whose son was he?" said Coote, appealingly, in about five minutes.

His voice sounded quite startling, after the long, solemn silence which
had gone before.

His two companions stared at him, afterwards at one another; then one of
them said--

"I forget."

"Whose son was he?" said Coote, turning with an air of desperation to
the other.

"Richard the Third's," said the latter.

Coote mused, and inwardly repeated a string of names.

"Doesn't sound right," said he. "Are you sure, Dick?"

"Who else could it be?" said the young gentleman addressed as Dick,
whose real name was Richardson.

"Hanged if I know," said the unhappy Coote, proceeding to write an R and
a 3 on his thumb-nail with a pencil. "It doesn't look right I believe
because your own name's Richardson, you think everybody else is
Richard's son too."

And the perpetrator of this very mild joke bent his head over his
learned thumb-nail, and frowned.

It was a point of honour at Mountjoy always to punish a joke summarily,
whether good, bad, or indifferent. For a short time, consequently, the
paternity of Edward the Fifth was lost sight of, as was also Coote
himself, in the performance of the duty which devolved on Richardson and
his companion.

This matter of business being at last satisfactorily settled, and Tom,
the driver, who had considerately pulled up by the road-side during the
"negotiations," being ordered to "forge ahead," the party returned to
its former attitude of gloomy anticipation.

"It's a precious rum thing," said Richardson, "neither you nor Heathcote
can remember a simple question like that. I'd almost forgot it,
myself."

"I know I shan't remember anything when the time comes," said Heathcote.
"I said my Latin Syntax over to Ashford, without a mistake, yesterday,
and I've forgotten every word of it now."

"What I funk is the _viva voce_ Latin prose," said Coote. "I say, Dick,
what's the gender of 'Amnis, a river?'"

Dick looked knowing, and laughed.

"None of your jokes," said he, "you don't catch me that way--'Amnis,' a
city, is neuter."

Coote's face lengthened, as he made a further note on his other thumb