t! A fight, you said:
and Wesley--was it Wesley?"

The boy nodded.

"Charles Wesley?"

"Well, it wouldn't be Samuel--at _his_ age: now would it?" The boy
grinned. The Reverend Samuel Wesley was the respected Head Usher of
Westminster School.

"And what will Charles Wesley be fighting about?"

"How should I know? Because he wants to, belike. But I was told it
began up school, with Randall's flinging a book at young Murray for a
lousy Scotch Jacobite."

"H'm: and where will it be?"

The boy dropped his voice to a drawl. "In Fighting-green, I believe,
sir: they told me Poets' Corner was already bespoke for a turn-up
between the Dean and Sall the charwoman, with the Head Verger for
bottle-holder--"

"Now, look here, young jackanapes--" But young jackanapes, catching
sight of half a dozen boys--the vanguard of Hutton's--at the street
corner, ducked himself free and raced from vengeance across the yard.

The old gentleman followed; and the crowd from Hutton's, surging
past, showed him the way to Fighting-green where a knot of King's
Scholars politely made room for him, perceiving that in spite of his
small stature, his rusty wig and countrified brown suit, he was a
person of some dignity and no little force of character. They read
it perhaps in the set of his mouth, perhaps in the high aquiline arch
of his nose, which he fed with snuff as he gazed round the ring while
the fighters rested, each in his corner, after the first round: for a
mill at Westminster was a ceremonious business, and the Head Master
had been known to adjourn school for one.

"H'm," said the newcomer; "no need to ask which is Wesley."

His eyes set deep beneath brows bristling like a wire-haired
terrier's--were on the boy in the farther corner, who sat on his
backer's knee, shoeless, stripped to the buff, with an angry red mark
on the right breast below the collar-bone; a slight boy and a trifle
undersized, but lithe, clear-skinned, and in the pink of condition; a
handsome boy, too. By his height you might have guessed him under
sixteen, but his face set you doubting. There are faces almost
uncannily good-looking: they charm so confidently that you shrink
from predicting the good fortune they claim, and bethink you that the
gods' favourites are said to die young: and Charles Wesley's was such
a face. He tightened the braces about his waist and stepped forward
for the second round with a sweet and serious smile. Yet his mouth
mea