rk adjusted Beetle's collar with
a savage tug. "Don't drop oil all over my 'Fors' or I'll scrag you!"

"Shut up, you--you Irish Biddy! 'Tisn't your beastly 'Fors.' It's one of
mine."

The book was a fat, brown-backed volume of the later Sixties, which King
had once thrown at Beetle's head that Beetle might see whence the
name Gigadibs came. Beetle had quietly annexed the book, and had
seen--several things. The quarter-comprehended verses lived and ate with
him, as the bedropped pages showed. He removed himself from all that
world, drifting at large with wondrous Men and Women, till McTurk
hammered the pilchard spoon on his head and he snarled.

"Beetle! You're oppressed and insulted and bullied by King. Don't you
feel it?"

"Let me alone! I can write some more poetry about him if I am, I
suppose."

"Mad! Quite mad!" said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange
beasts. "Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and McTurk reads an ass
called Ruskin; and--"

"Ruskin isn't an ass," said McTurk. "He's almost as good as the Opium
Eater. He says 'we're children of noble races trained by surrounding
art.' That means _me_, and the way I decorated the study when you two
badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a
noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading, or I'll shove a
pilchard down your neck!"

"It's two to one," said Stalky, warningly, and Beetle closed the book,
in obedience to the law under which he and his companions had lived for
six checkered years.

The visitors looked on delighted. Number Five study had a reputation for
more variegated insanity than the rest of the school put together; and
so far as its code allowed friendship with outsiders it was polite and
open-hearted to its neighbors on the same landing.

"What rot do you want now?" said Beetle.

"King! War!" said McTurk, jerking his head toward the wall, where hung a
small wooden West-African war-drum, a gift to McTurk from a naval uncle.

"Then we shall be turned out of the study again," said Beetle, who loved
his flesh-pots. "Mason turned us out for--just warbling on it." Mason
was the mathematical master who had testified in Common-room.

"Warbling?--O Lord!" said Abanazar. "We couldn't hear ourselves speak in
our study when you played the infernal thing. What's the good of getting
turned out of your study, anyhow?"

"We lived in the form-rooms for a week, too," said Beetle, tragically.
"And it was bea