Lorna Doone | Page 8

R.D. Blackmore
through

the rails, where a square of broader lattice is, and sniffed at me, and
began to crop gently after my fingers. But whatever lives or dies,
business must be attended to; and the principal business of good
Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another.
"Come up, Jack," said one of the boys, lifting me under the chin; "he
hit you, and you hit him, you know."
"Pay your debts before you go," said a monitor, striding up to me, after
hearing how the honour lay; "Ridd, you must go through with it."
"Fight, for the sake of the junior first," cried the little fellow in my ear,
the clever one, the head of our class, who had mocked John Fry, and
knew all about the aorists, and tried to make me know it; but I never
went more than three places up, and then it was an accident, and I came
down after dinner. The boys were urgent round me to fight, though my
stomach was not up for it; and being very slow of wit (which is not
chargeable on me), I looked from one to other of them, seeking any
cure for it. Not that I was afraid of fighting, for now I had been three
years at Blundell's, and foughten, all that time, a fight at least once
every week, till the boys began to know me; only that the load on my
heart was not sprightly as of the hay-field. It is a very sad thing to dwell
on; but even now, in my time of wisdom, I doubt it is a fond thing to
imagine, and a motherly to insist upon, that boys can do without
fighting. Unless they be very good boys, and afraid of one another.
"Nay," I said, with my back against the wrought-iron stay of the gate,
which was socketed into Cop's house-front: "I will not fight thee now,
Robin Snell, but wait till I come back again."
"Take coward's blow, Jack Ridd, then," cried half a dozen little boys,
shoving Bob Snell forward to do it; because they all knew well enough,
having striven with me ere now, and proved me to be their master--they
knew, I say, that without great change, I would never accept that
contumely. But I took little heed of them, looking in dull wonderment
at John Fry, and Smiler, and the blunderbuss, and Peggy. John Fry was
scratching his head, I could see, and getting blue in the face, by the
light from Cop's parlour-window, and going to and fro upon Smiler, as

if he were hard set with it. And all the time he was looking briskly from
my eyes to the fist I was clenching, and methought he tried to wink at
me in a covert manner; and then Peggy whisked her tail.
"Shall I fight, John?" I said at last; "I would an you had not come,
John."
"Chraist's will be done; I zim thee had better faight, Jan," he answered,
in a whisper, through the gridiron of the gate; "there be a dale of
faighting avore thee. Best wai to begin gude taime laike. Wull the
geatman latt me in, to zee as thee hast vair plai, lad?"
He looked doubtfully down at the colour of his cowskin boots, and the
mire upon the horses, for the sloughs were exceedingly mucky. Peggy,
indeed, my sorrel pony, being lighter of weight, was not crusted much
over the shoulders; but Smiler (our youngest sledder) had been well in
over his withers, and none would have deemed him a piebald, save of
red mire and black mire. The great blunderbuss, moreover, was choked
with a dollop of slough-cake; and John Fry's sad-coloured Sunday hat
was indued with a plume of marish-weed. All this I saw while he was
dismounting, heavily and wearily, lifting his leg from the saddle-cloth
as if with a sore crick in his back.
By this time the question of fighting was gone quite out of our
discretion; for sundry of the elder boys, grave and reverend signors,
who had taken no small pleasure in teaching our hands to fight, to ward,
to parry, to feign and counter, to lunge in the manner of sword-play,
and the weaker child to drop on one knee when no cunning of fence
might baffle the onset--these great masters of the art, who would far
liefer see us little ones practise it than themselves engage, six or seven
of them came running down the rounded causeway, having heard that
there had arisen "a snug little mill" at the gate. Now whether that word
hath origin in a Greek term meaning a conflict, as the best-read boys
asseverated, or whether it is nothing more than a figure of similitude,
from the beating arms of
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