om the scene, for
at the precise ending of that time I was violently set upon by three
or four boys, dragged, protesting and frightened, to a private
retreat, and there informed that my nauseating familiarity with the
French language and consequent "showing off" therein must cease
incontinently, and that the event of my refusing this ultimatum would
be a perilous and not easily forgotten one for a little sneak like me.

Now our school at Vevay had been entirely under the influence, in its
secret and really important life, of a circle of English boys, cruelly
banished from their natural educational facilities, who made up for
this banishment by a careful and systematic insistence on as much as
possible of their native school atmosphere, and we little ones were
bred up in this very strictly. The word "sneak" was too much for me,
and I flew at the offender, which was, I suppose, what he wanted.

It would have gone hard indeed with me had not a tall,
broad-shouldered boy, glorious in a jersey enriched with the initials
of the school, swung suddenly upon us and twitched me out of the
bandit crew by my coat collar.

"What's all this? What are you up to?" he asked briskly.

He had a baseball bat with him--I regarded baseball at that time as a
sort of cricket gone mad--and a round visored cap on his thick fair
hair. His chin was deeply cleft, his eyes grey-blue, his skin very
fair. To me he was an upper-form demi-god and I, seeing nothing odd in
his actions, for he was what I called the cock of the school, voiced
my trembling plea.

"If you please, sir," I began, whereat he blushed and my captors burst
into derisive shouts and capered around us, and thoroughly embarrassed
and frightened, I began to snivel into my elbow.

"We don't talk that way over here," he admonished me shortly, "go
ahead without any sirs, can't you?"

Well, it all came out finally and he settled it very easily, though
not, I am sure, in the way he had at first intended to. I saw his
fingers tighten around the bat, I saw him warily measuring his chances
against four twelve-year-olds, and realised suddenly that this was not
Albion the long desired of some of us at Vevay, but free America, and
that this was not really the head boy nor had he any rights in
particular beyond any knight's who chooses to ride a-rescuing.
Nevertheless I was and am sure he could have punished them all and
that without the bat. Suddenly, however, a reflective look came across