CHAPTER I
“MILL—mill! A mill!”
At the entrance of Dean’s Yard, Westminster, a small King’s Scholar, waving his gown and yelling, collided with an old gentleman hobbling round the corner, and sat down suddenly in the gutter with a squeal, as a bagpipe collapses. The old gentleman rotated on one leg like a dervish, made an ineffectual stoop to clutch his gouty toe and wound up by bringing his rattan cane smartly down on the boy’s shoulders.
“Owgh! Owgh! Stand up, you young villain! My temper’s hasty, and here’s a shilling-piece to cry quits. Stand up and tell me now—is it Fire, Robbery, or Murder?”
The youngster pounced at the shilling, shook off the hand on his collar, and darted down Little College Street to Hutton’s Boarding House, under the windows of which he pulled up and executed a derisive war-dance.
“Hutton’s, Hutton’s,
Put up your buttons,
Hutton’s are rottenly Whigs—”
“Mill—mill! Come out and carry home your Butcher Randall!
You’ll be wanted when Wesley has done with him.”
He was speeding back by this time, and flung this last taunt from a safe distance. The old gentleman collared him again by the entry.
“Stop, my friend—here, hold hard for a moment! 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 t