e games which he had won by his activity and strength.

It was a Sunday afternoon, toward the end of the summer term, and the
boys were sauntering about in the green playground, or lying on the
banks reading and chatting. Eric was with a little knot of his chief
friends, enjoying the sea-breeze as they sat on the grass. At last the
bell of the school chapel began to ring, and they went in to the
afternoon service. Eric usually sat with Duncan and Llewellyn,
immediately behind the benches allotted to chance visitors. The bench
in front of them happened on this afternoon to be occupied by some
rather odd people, viz, an old man with long white hair,--and two ladies
remarkably stout, who were dressed with much juvenility, although past
middle age. Their appearance immediately attracted notice, and no
sooner had they taken their seats than Duncan and Llewellyn began to
titter. The ladies' bonnets, which were of white, trimmed with long
green leaves and flowers, just peered over the top of the boys' pew, and
excited much amusement; particularly when Duncan, in his irresistible
sense of the ludicrous, began to adorn them with little bits of paper.
But Eric had not yet learnt to disregard the solemnity of the place, and
the sacred act in which they were engaged. He tried to look away and
attend to the service, and for a time he partially succeeded, although,
seated as he was between the two triflers, who were perpetually
telegraphing to each other their jokes, he found it a difficult task,
and secretly he began to be much tickled.

At last the sermon commenced, and Llewellyn, who had imprisoned a
grasshopper in a paper cage, suddenly let it hop out. The first hop
took it to the top of the pew; the second perched it on the shoulder of
the stoutest lady. Duncan and Llewellyn tittered louder, and even Eric
could not resist a smile. But when the lady, feeling some irritation on
her shoulder, raised her hand, and the grasshopper took a frightened
leap into the centre of the green foliage which enwreathed her bonnet,
none of the three could stand it, and they burst into fits of laughter,
which they tried in vain to conceal by bending down their heads and
cramming their fists into their mouths. Eric, having once given way,
enjoyed the joke uncontrollably, and the lady made matters worse by her
uneasy attempts to dislodge the unknown intruder, and discover the cause
of the tittering, which she could not help hearing. At la