The Cock-House at Fellsgarth

Cock-House at Fellsgarth, by
Talbot Baines Reed

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Title: The Cock-House at Fellsgarth
Author: Talbot Baines Reed
Release Date: April 11, 2007 [EBook #21037]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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COCK-HOUSE AT FELLSGARTH ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

The Cock-House at Fellsgarth
By Talbot Baines Reed
For some reason this book was quite hard to convert to e-Book, so that

if any error is detected by a reader I would be grateful if I could be told,
either by email, or by using our Bulletin Board.
This is another story set in a nineteenth century boy's boarding school,
and is quite similar to "The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's".
At the time it was greatly acclaimed, and said to be very like a real
boarding school, but things must have changed because I was at one
such school only fifty years after this book was written, and I can't
imagine any of it happening at my school. On the other hand I was also
at a boarding school for boys aged 8 to 13, which was much more like
the school in this story. As I say, things must have changed.
It takes about ten hours to play as an audiobook. There are a number of
quite tense incidents, particularly when a party of boys decide to walk
up a nearby mountain, and the weather turns very nasty. This is in
chapters 17 to 19. But there are many other well-described incidents, so
do read the book, remembering that boys' slang has changed greatly in
the past hundred years.
THE COCK-HOUSE AT FELLSGARTH
BY TALBOT BAINES REED
CHAPTER ONE.
GREEN AND BLUE.
First-night at Fellsgarth was always a festive occasion. The holidays
were over, and school had not yet begun. All day long, from remote
quarters, fellows had been converging on the dear old place; and here
they were at last, shoulder to shoulder, delighted to find themselves
back in the old haunts. The glorious memories of the summer holidays
were common property. So was not a little of the pocket-money. So, by
rule immemorial, were the contents of the hampers. And so, as they
discovered to their cost, were the luckless new boys who had to-day
tumbled for the first time headlong into the whirlpool of public school
life.

Does some one tell me he never heard of Fellsgarth? I am surprised.
Where can you have been brought up that you have never heard of the
venerable ivy-clad pile with its watch-tower and two wings, planted
there, where the rivers Shale and Shargle mingle their waters, a mile or
more above Hawkswater? My dear sir, Fellsgarth stood there before the
days when Henry the Eighth, (of whom you may have possibly heard in
the history books) abolished the monasteries and, some wicked people
do say, annexed their contents.
There is very little of the old place standing now. A piece of the wall in
the head-master's garden and the lower buttresses of the watch-tower,
that is all. The present building is comparatively modern; that is to say,
it is no older than the end of the Civil Wars, when some lucky adherent
to the winning side built it up as a manor-house and disfigured the
tower with those four pepper-castors at the corners. Successive owners
have tinkered the place since then, but they cannot quite spoil it. Who
can spoil red brick and ivy, in such a situation?
Not know Fellsgarth! Have you never been on Hawkswater then, with
its lonely island, and the grey screes swooping down into the clear
water? And have you never seen Hawk's Pike, which frowns in on the
fellows through the dormitory window? I don't ask if you have been up
it. Only three persons, to my knowledge (guides and natives of course
excepted), have done that. Yorke was one, Mr Stratton was another,
and the other--but that's to be part of my story.
First-night, as I have said, was a specially "go-as-you-please" occasion
at the school. Masters, having called over their roll, disappeared into
their own quarters and discreetly heard nothing. Dames, having
received and unpacked the "night-bags," retired elsewhere to wrestle
with the big luggage. The cooks, having passably satisfied the cravings
of two hundred and fifty hungry souls, and having removed out of
harm's way the most perishable of the crockery, shrugged their
shoulders and shut themselves into the kitchens, listening to the noise
and