ked slowly across the
cricket-field, mentally seeing the wild forest of the East with its
strange palms that run from tree to tree, rising up or growing down,
here forming festoons, there tangling and matting the lower growth
together, and always beautiful whenever seen.

Strange musings for a couple of schoolboys, who never once connected
these objects of their thoughts with the stringent master's cane--the
rattan or properly _rotan_-cane or climbing-palm.

They stopped at last in their favourite place beneath the elms, and
stood with their hands in their pockets and their shoulders against the
park-palings--the patch that looked newish, but which was gradually
growing grey under the influence of the weather that was oxidising the
new nails and sending a ruddy stain through the wood.

Neither spoke, but stood gazing up through the elm boughs, their
thoughts far away in Northern India, dwelling upon active monkeys,
peacocks and other gorgeously plumaged birds, tigers haunting nullahs
and crouching among the reeds. All at once there was a strange panting
sound, and a scratching behind them on the park-palings which made the
two lads start away and turn to gaze at their late support, for the
sound suggested, if not a tiger some other savage beast trying to climb
the division between the Doctor's premises and the adjoining estate.

The next moment eight fat fingers appeared grasping the palings, there
was the scratching of a boot on one of the supporting posts, and a
round, red, fat face rose above the top of the fence like a small
representation of the sun gradually topping a bank of mist upon a foggy
morning.

Glyn Severn's Schooldays--by George Manville Fenn

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.

HIS GREAT ATTRACTION.

"Mr Ramball!" cried the boys in a breath. "Aha! Good-morning! Only
to think of me looking over here to see if I could catch sight of you
two young gents, and hitting upon just the right spot, and--Oh my!"

There was a rushing sound as the wild-beast proprietor suddenly
disappeared--so suddenly that, moved as by one impulse, the two lads
made a dash at the palings, sprang up, and held on to look over, and see
Ramball seated on the ground in the act of taking off his hat and
extricating his yellow silk handkerchief to dab his bald and dewy head.

"Hurt?" cried Glyn anxiously. "Well, I--I don't quite know yet," said
their unexpected visitor. "I haven't sat down as quick as that for a
precious long tim