PTER III.

SCHOOL CRICKET--LEMON-KALI--THE BOYS' BRIDGE--AN UNEXPECTED EMERGENCY.

Rupert and I were now the best of good friends again. I cared more for
his favour than for the goodwill of any one else, and kept as much
with him as I could.

I played cricket with him in the school matches. At least I did not
bat or bowl, but I and some of the junior fellows "fielded out," and
when Rupert was waiting for the ball, I would have given my life to
catch quickly and throw deftly. I used to think no one ever looked so
handsome as he did in his orange-coloured shirt, white flannel
trousers, and the cap which Henrietta made him. He and I had spent all
our savings on that new shirt, for Mother would not get him a new one.
She did not like cricket, or anything at which people could hurt
themselves. But Johnson Major had get a new sky-blue shirt and cap,
and we did not like Rupert to be outdone by him, for Johnson's father
is only a canal-carrier.

But the shirt emptied our pockets, and made the old cap look worse
than ever. Then Henrietta, without saying a word to us, bought some
orange flannel, and picked the old cap to pieces, and cut out a new
one by it, and made it all herself, with a button, and a stiff peak
and everything, and it really did perfectly, and looked very well in
the sunshine over Rupert's brown face and glossy black hair.

There always was sunshine when we played cricket. The hotter it was
the better we liked it. We had a bottle of lemon-kali powder on the
ground, and I used to have to make a fizzing-cup in a tin mug for the
other boys. I got the water from the canal.

Lemon-kali is delicious on a very hot day--so refreshing! But I
sometimes fancied I felt a little sick _afterwards_, if I had had a
great deal. And Bustard (who was always called Bustard-Plaster,
because he was the doctor's son) said it was the dragons out of the
canal water lashing their tails inside us. He had seen them under his
father's microscope.

The field where we played was on the banks of the canal, the opposite
side to the town. I believe it was school property. At any rate we had
the right of playing there.

We had to go nearly a quarter of a mile out of the way before there
was a bridge, and it was very vexatious to toil a quarter of a mile
down on one side and a quarter of a mile up on the other to get at a
meadow which lay directly opposite to the school. Weston wrote a
letter about it to the weekly paper asking the tow