oach was usually managed with great skill and strategy, and before
the small boy was aware Bull was squatting beside him using
blandishments both moral and minatory.

He was a very gifted boy. He had no bent for learning lessons but he
had a great gift for collecting and turning to his own use the property
of other people. Sometimes three or four boys swore a Solemn League
and Covenant against him. His perplexity then was extreme. He saw
toffee being devoured and none of it coming his way. Possibly his
method of thinking was in pictures, and he could visualise with painful
clarity the alien gullets down which toffee was traveling, and,
simultaneously, he could see the woeful emptiness of his own red lane.
He must have felt that all was not right with a Providence which could
allow such happenings. A world wherein there was toffee for others and
none for him was certainly a world out of joint. His idea of Utopia
would be a place where there were lots of things for him to eat and a
circle of hungry boys who watched his deliberate jaws with envy and
humility. Furthermore, the idea that smaller boys could have, not the
courage, but the heart to congregate against him, must have come to him
with a shock. He was appalled by a sense of the sinfulness of human
nature, and dismayed by the odds against which virtue has to fight.

The others, strong in numbers, followed him on such occasions chewing
their tuck with grave deliberation, descanting minutely and loudly on
the taste of each bit, the splendid length of time it took to dissolve,
and the blessedly large quantity which yet remained to be eaten. He
threatened them, but his threats were received with yawns. He wheedled
(a thing he could do consummately well) but they were not to be
blandished. He mapped out on his own person the particular and painful
places where later on he would hit them unless he was bound over to the
peace by toffee. And they sucked their sweetstuff and made diagrams on
each other of the places where they could hit Bull if they had a mind
to, and told each other and him that he was not worth hitting and,
would probably die if he were hit. But they were careful not dissolve
partnership until the sweets were eaten and beyond even the wildest
hopes of salvage. Then, in the later-on that had been predicted, Bull
captured them in detail, and, as he had promised, he "lammed the
stuffing" out of them.

He had all the grave wisdom of the stupid, and the extra