Follow My Leader | Page 2

awe and trembling, to the examination hall of Templeton
school, there to submit themselves to an ordeal which would decide
whether or not they were worthy to emerge from their probationary
state and take their rank among the public schoolboys of the land.
Such being the case, it is little wonder they looked fidgety as they
caught their last glimpse of Mr Ashford, and realised that before they
came in sight of Mountjoy again a crisis in the lives of each of them
would have come and gone.
"Whose son was he?" said Coote, appealingly, in about five minutes.
His voice sounded quite startling, after the long, solemn silence which
had gone before.
His two companions stared at him, afterwards at one another; then one
of them said--
"I forget."
"Whose son was he?" said Coote, turning with an air of desperation to
the other.
"Richard the Third's," said the latter.
Coote mused, and inwardly repeated a string of names.
"Doesn't sound right," said he. "Are you sure, Dick?"
"Who else could it be?" said the young gentleman addressed as Dick,

whose real name was Richardson.
"Hanged if I know," said the unhappy Coote, proceeding to write an R
and a 3 on his thumb-nail with a pencil. "It doesn't look right I believe
because your own name's Richardson, you think everybody else is
Richard's son too."
And the perpetrator of this very mild joke bent his head over his
learned thumb-nail, and frowned.
It was a point of honour at Mountjoy always to punish a joke
summarily, whether good, bad, or indifferent. For a short time,
consequently, the paternity of Edward the Fifth was lost sight of, as
was also Coote himself, in the performance of the duty which devolved
on Richardson and his companion.
This matter of business being at last satisfactorily settled, and Tom, the
driver, who had considerately pulled up by the road-side during the
"negotiations," being ordered to "forge ahead," the party returned to its
former attitude of gloomy anticipation.
"It's a precious rum thing," said Richardson, "neither you nor Heathcote
can remember a simple question like that. I'd almost forgot it, myself."
"I know I shan't remember anything when the time comes," said
Heathcote. "I said my Latin Syntax over to Ashford, without a mistake,
yesterday, and I've forgotten every word of it now."
"What I funk is the viva voce Latin prose," said Coote. "I say, Dick,
what's the gender of 'Amnis, a river?'"
Dick looked knowing, and laughed.
"None of your jokes," said he, "you don't catch me that way--'Amnis,' a
city, is neuter."
Coote's face lengthened, as he made a further note on his other thumb-
nail.

"I could have sworn it was a river," said he. "I say, whatever shall I do?
I don't know how I shall get through it."
"Through what--the river?" said Heathcote. "Bless you, you'll get
through swimmingly."
There was a moment's pause. Richardson looked at Coote; Coote
looked at Richardson, and between them they thought they saw a joke.
Tom pulled up by the road-side once more, while Heathcote arranged
with his creditors on the floor of the waggonette. When, at length, the
order to proceed was given, that trusty Jehu ventured on a mild
expostulation. "Look'ee here, young gem'an," said he, touching his hat.
"You've got to get to Templeton by ten o'clock, and it's past nine now. I
guess you'd better save up them larks for when you're coming home."
"None of your cheek, Tom," said Richardson, "or we'll have you down
here, and pay you out, my boy. Put it on, can't you? Why don't you
whip the beast up?"
The prospect of coming down to be paid out by his vivacious
passengers was sufficiently alarming to Tom to induce him to take their
admonition seriously to heart; and for the rest of the journey, although
several times business transactions were taking place on the floor of the
vehicle, the plodding horse held on its course, and Markridge duly hove
in sight.
With the approaching end of the journey, the boys once more became
serious and uncomfortable.
"I say," said Coote, in a whisper, as if Dr Winter, at Templeton, a mile
away, were within hearing, "do tell me whose son he was. I'm certain
he wasn't Richard the Third's. Don't be a cad, Dick; you might tell a
fellow. I'd tell you, if I knew."
"I've told you one father," said Dick, sternly, "and he didn't have more.
If you want another, stick down Edward the Sixth."

Coote's face brightened, as he produced his pencil and cleaned his
largest unoccupied nail.
"That sounds more--, Oh, but, I say, how can Edward the Sixth be
Edward the Fifth's father? Besides, he had no family and-- Oh, what a
howling howler I shall come!"
His friends