The mist in the air surrounded the lights with a halo, and my
nostrils were filled with the acrid smell of burning leaves.
I had stood there a quarter of an hour perhaps, when a boy came up
and spoke to me, and the sound of his voice gave me a shock. I think
it was the first time in my life a boy had spoken kindly to me. He
asked me my name, and told me that it would be supper-time in five
minutes, so that I could go and sit in the dining-hall and wait.
"You'll be all right, you know," he said, as he passed on; "they're
not a bad lot of chaps." The revulsion nearly brought on a
catastrophe, for the tears rose to my eyes and I gazed after him with
a swimming head. I had prepared myself to receive blows and insults
with a calm brow, but I had no armour with which to oppose the noble
weapons of sympathy and good fellowship. They overcame the stubborn
hatred with which I was accustomed to meet life, and left me
defenceless. I felt as if I had been face to face with the hero of a
dream.
As I sat at supper before a long table decorated with plates of
bread-and-butter and cheese I saw my friend sitting at the other end
of the room, so I asked the boy next to me to tell me his name. "Oh,"
he said, looking curiously at my blushes, "you mean old mother F----.
He's pious, you know; reads the Bible and funks at games and all
that."
There are some things which no self-respecting schoolboy can afford
to forgive. I had made up my mind that it was not pleasant to be an
Ishmael, that as far as possible I would try to be an ordinary boy at
my new school.
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