, for the
most part, the constant use of those surest keepers of the peace, the
boxing-gloves, kept the School-house boys from fighting one another. Two
or three nights in every week the gloves were brought out, either in the
hall or fifth-form room; and every boy who was ever likely to fight at
all knew all his neighbours' prowess perfectly well, and could tell to a
nicety what chance he would have in a stand-up fight with any other
boy in the house. But, of course, no such experience could be gotten as
regarded boys in other houses; and as most of the other houses were more
or less jealous of the School-house, collisions were frequent.

After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know?
From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the
business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man.
Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be
they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickednesses in
high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry,
who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.

It is no good for quakers, or any other body of men, to uplift their
voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they
don't follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own
piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better
world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn't be our
world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no
peace, and isn't meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk
fighting the wrong people and the wrong things, but I'd a deal sooner
see them doing that than that they should have no fight in them. So
having recorded, and being about to record, my hero's fights of all
sorts, with all sorts of enemies, I shall now proceed to give an account
of his passage-at-arms with the only one of his school-fellows whom he
ever had to encounter in this manner.

It was drawing towards the close of Arthur's first half-year, and
the May evenings were lengthening out. Locking-up was not till eight
o'clock, and everybody was beginning to talk about what he would do in
the holidays. The shell, in which form all our dramatis personae now
are, were reading, amongst other things, the last book of Homer's
"Iliad," and had worked through it as far as the speeches of the women
over Hector's body. It is a whole schoo