A Great Emergency and Other Tales | Page 9

and hitting (less
scientifically but more effectually than when Henrietta and I flourished
our stuffed driving gloves, with strict and constant reference to the
woodcuts in a sixpenny Boxer's Guide) before I got slightly stunned, I
do not know; when I came round I was lying in Weston's arms, and
Johnson Minor was weeping bitterly (as he believed) over my corpse. I
fear Weston had not allayed his remorse.
My great anxiety was to shake hands with Johnson. I never felt more
friendly towards any one.
He met me in the handsomest way. He apologized for speaking of my
father--"since you don't like it," he added, with an appearance of
sincerity which puzzled me at the time, and which I did not understand
till afterwards--and I apologized for calling him a coward. We were
always good friends, and our fight made an end of the particular chaff
which had caused it.
It reconciled Rupert to me too, which was my greatest gain.
Rupert is quite right. There is nothing like being prepared for
emergencies. I suppose, as I was stunned, that Johnson got the best of it;
but judging from his appearance as we washed ourselves at the school
pump, I was now quite prepared for the emergency of having to defend
myself against any boy not twice my own size.
CHAPTER 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 town to build us a bridge. He wrote
splendid letters, and this was one of his very best. He said that if the

town council laughed at the notion of building a bridge for boys, they
must remember that the Boys of to-day were the Men of to-morrow
(which we all thought a grand sentence, though MacDonald, a very
accurate-minded fellow, said it would really be some years before most
of us were grown up). Then Weston called us the Rising Generation,
and showed that, in all probability, the Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor,
and Primate of the years to come now played "all unconscious of their
future fame" in the