th anyone who baited me again. Then
the captain made a proposition for which I have been thankful all
my life long.

"The moral of it is, Ellery, that Humphrey must be a pupil of mine.

"Give me your arm, boy.

"Ah!" says he, feeling the muscle, which was soft enough, no doubt,
seeing that I was only eleven and had never done anything about the
farm. "We must alter that. Let him come to me twice a week, Ellery,
and he shall learn the arts of self defense, first with nature's
own weapons, for boxing I take to be the true foundation of all
bodily exercise, and afterwards, when he is a little grown, the
more delicate science of swordsmanship, which demands bodily
strength and wits, and to which the other is but a prelude. And I
warrant you, if he have the right stuff in him, that by the time
the schoolmaster has done with him he shall be able to hold his own
against any man, and will need no succors from Joe Punchard or
anyone else."

Hereupon Mistress Pennyquick set up a cry about the wickedness of
teaching little boys to fight, and the state she would be in if I
was some day brought home mangled and disfigured, and a great deal
more to the same effect. The captain tapped the table until she had
finished, and then, with a fine courtly bow, he said:

"Spoken like a woman, ma'am. Humphrey will suffer hard knocks, to
be sure; yes, please God, he shall have many a black eye, and many
a bloody nose, and we shall make a man of him, ma'am: a gentleman
he is already."

"Yes, to be sure," says the simple creature, "and his mother was a
born lady, and--"

"Tuts, ma'am," the captain here interrupted. "I was not alluding to
his pedigree. The boy has suffered torment for months without
breathing a word of it to betray his schoolfellows; from that I
deduce that he has the spirit of a gentleman, and I want no further
proof."

"'Tis time the boy was abed," says my father. "Run away, lad."

I got up at once to go, guessing that my father wished to have some
private talk with Captain Galsworthy. My ears were tingling, I
confess, with his praise of me, and my heart throbbed with delight
and pride at the thought of being the captain's pupil. I could not
sleep for thinking of it. I imagined all manner of scenes in which
I should some day figure, and saw myself already holding off five
enemies at once with my flashing sword. These visions haunted my
dreams when at last I slept, and it was after a bout of especial
fierceness that