and happy-hearted boy, you know."

"A frank and happy-hearted fiddlestick!" cried Paul rudely (he was so
disgusted at the suggestion); "don't talk rubbish, sir! I thought you
were going to show me some way out of all this, and instead of that,
knowing the shameful way I've been treated, you can stand there and
calmly recommend me to stay on here and be happy-hearted and frank!"

"You must be calm, Bultitude, or I shall leave you. Listen to reason.
You are here for your good. Youth, it has been beautifully said, is the
springtime of life. Though you may not believe it, you will never be
happier than you are now. Our schooldays are----"

But Mr. Bultitude could not tamely be mocked with the very platitudes
that had brought him all his misery--he cut the master short in a
violent passion. "This is too much!" he cried--"you shall not palm off
that miserable rubbish on me. I see through it. It's a plot to keep me
here, and you're in it. It's false imprisonment, and I'll write to the
_Times_. I'll expose the whole thing!"

"This violence is only ridiculous," said Mr. Blinkhorn. "If I were not
too pained by it, I should feel it my duty to report your language to
the Doctor. As it is, you have bitterly disappointed me; I can't
understand it at all. You seemed so subdued, so softened lately. But
until you come to me and say you regret this, I must decline to have
anything more to say to you. Take your book and sit down in your place!"

And he went back to his exercises, looking puzzled and pained. The fact
was, he was an ardent believer in the Good Boy of a certain order of
school tales--the boy who is seized with a sudden conviction of the
intrinsic baseness of boyhood, and does all in his power to get rid of
the harmful taint; the boy who renounces his old comrades and his
natural tastes (which after all seldom have any serious harm in them),
to don a panoply of priggishness which is too often kick-proof.

This kind of boy is rare enough at most English schools, but Mr.
Blinkhorn had been educated at a large Nonconformist College, where
"Revivals" and "Awakenings" were periodical, and undoubtedly did produce
changes of character violent enough, but sadly short in duration.

He was always waiting for some such boy to come to him with his
confession of moral worthlessness and vows of unnatural perfection, and
was too simple and earnest and good himself to realise that such states
of the youthful mind are not unfrequently m