s.

Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero.
It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d'Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to
the chin; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry "Well
done!"; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at
Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain
in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every "whe--e--et" of the
bullets at his ear bringing the moment's alarm to his teeth in a checked
sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams,
to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the
battle-lines upon the page--the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the
blistered and bruised plaster of the wall to see horsemen at the charge
and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of
Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting,
commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly
embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and
he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the
master's desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the
vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie.

Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled
down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him.

"At the play-acting again, Master Gilian?" said the dominie a little
bitterly, a little humorously. "And what might it be this time?"

"Sogers," said the boy most red and awkward.

"Ay, ay," said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him
with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. "Soldiers is it? And the
playground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind.
Soldiers! H'm! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in
vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you're going to
meet Captain Campbell's most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade
early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts.
Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a
boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of
heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and--my work's hopeless.
Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become the soldier you play-act
to-day you'll please the Paymaster; I could scarcely wish for better
and--and--I maybe wished for worse."

That night Gilian went to