I fight, John?" I said at last; "I would an you had not come,
John."

"Chraist's will be done; I zim thee had better faight, Jan," he
answered, in a whisper, through the gridiron of the gate; "there be a
dale of faighting avore thee. Best wai to begin gude taime laike. Wull
the geatman latt me in, to zee as thee hast vair plai, lad?"

He looked doubtfully down at the colour of his cowskin boots, and the
mire upon the horses, for the sloughs were exceedingly mucky. Peggy,
indeed, my sorrel pony, being lighter of weight, was not crusted much
over the shoulders; but Smiler (our youngest sledder) had been well in
over his withers, and none would have deemed him a piebald, save of red
mire and black mire. The great blunderbuss, moreover, was choked with a
dollop of slough-cake; and John Fry's sad-coloured Sunday hat was indued
with a plume of marish-weed. All this I saw while he was dismounting,
heavily and wearily, lifting his leg from the saddle-cloth as if with a
sore crick in his back.

By this time the question of fighting was gone quite out of our
discretion; for sundry of the elder boys, grave and reverend signors,
who had taken no small pleasure in teaching our hands to fight, to ward,
to parry, to feign and counter, to lunge in the manner of sword-play,
and the weaker child to drop on one knee when no cunning of fence might
baffle the onset--these great masters of the art, who would far liefer
see us little ones practise it than themselves engage, six or seven of
them came running down the rounded causeway, having heard that there
had arisen "a snug little mill" at the gate. Now whether that word
hath origin in a Greek term meaning a conflict, as the best-read boys
asseverated, or whether it is nothing more than a figure of similitude,
from the beating arms of a mill, such as I have seen in counties where
are no waterbrooks, but folk make bread with wind--it is not for a man
devoid of scholarship to determine. Enough that they who made the ring
intituled the scene a "mill," while we who must be thumped inside it
tried to rejoice in their pleasantry, till it turned upon the stomach.

Moreover, I felt upon me now a certain responsibility, a dutiful need to
maintain, in the presence of John Fry, the manliness of the Ridd family,
and the honour of Exmoor. Hitherto none had worsted me, although in the
three years of my schooling, I had fought more than threescore battles,
and bedewed with blood every plant of grass t