ion), and that being so, it would surely
be a waste of precious opportunity if they failed to signalise the event
by some little celebration. And, as it happened, there was a little
celebration which badly wanted celebrating, and for which only a chance
like the present could have been considered favourable. In other words,
there was a rather long score which the juniors of Parrett's were
anxious to settle up with the juniors of Welch's. The debt was of long
standing, having begun as far back as the middle of the Lent term, when
the Welchers had played upon some of Parrett's with a hose from behind
their own door, and culminating in the unprovoked outrage upon the
luckless Parson on the river that very morning.

Now if there was one thing more than another the young Parretts prided
themselves in, it was their punctuality in matters of business; and it
had troubled them sorely that circumstances over which they had no
control (in other words, the fear of Wyndham) should have prevented
their settling scores with the Welchers at an earlier date.

Now, however, an opportunity was come, and, like all honest men, they
determined at once to avail themselves of it.

So the reason why Bloomfield and Game could find no fags in Parrett's
house to steer for them was because all the fags of Parrett's house,
aided by Telson of the schoolhouse, were at that moment paying a
business call at Welch's, and having on the whole rather a lively time
of it.

The juniors of Welch's were, take them altogether, a rather more rowdy
lot than the juniors of either of the two other houses, or, indeed, than
those of both the other houses put together. Somehow Welch's was always
the rowdy house of Willoughby. The honours of the school, whether in
class or in field, always seemed to go in any direction but their own,
and as, for five or six years at any rate, they had been unable to claim
any one distinguished Willoughbite as a member of their house, they had
come to regard themselves somewhat in the light of Ishmaelites.
Everybody's hand seemed to be against them, and they therefore didn't
see why their hand shouldn't be against every one.

It was this feeling which had prompted the assaults of which the
youthful Parretts had come to complain, and which the Welchers
distributed as impartially as possible among all their fellow
Willoughbites.

The fact was, Welch's was a bad house. The fellows there rarely made
common cause for any lawful