moment the bell began.
And by the time Pocket had changed his black tie for a green one with red
spots, in which he had come back after the Easter holidays, the bell had
stopped and the quad was empty; before it filled again he would be up in
town and on his way to Welbeck Street in a hansom.

The very journey was a joy. It was such sport to be flying through a
world of buttercups and daisies in a train again, so refreshing to feel as
good as anybody else in the third smoker; for even the grown men in the
corner seats did not dream of calling the youth an "old ass," much less a
young one, to his face. His friends and contemporaries at school were in
the habit of employing the ameliorating adjective, but there were still a
few fellows in Pocket's house who made an insulting point of the other.
All, however, seemed agreed as to the noun; and it was pleasant to cast
off friend and foe for a change, to sit comfortably unknown and
unsuspected of one's foibles in the train. It made Pocket feel a bit of a
man; but then he really was almost seventeen, and in the Middle Fifth, and
allowed to smoke asthma cigarettes in bed. He took one out of a cardboard
box in his bag, and thought it might do him good to smoke it now. But an
adult tobacco-smoker looked so curiously at the little thin cross between
cigar and cigarette, that it was transferred to a pocket unlit, and the
coward hid himself behind his paper, in which there were several items of
immediate interest to him. Would the match hold out at Lord's? If not,
which was the best of the Wednesday matinees? Pocket had received a pound
from home for his expenses, so that these questions took an adventitious
precedence over even such attractive topics as an execution and a murder
that bade fair to lead to one. But the horrors had their turn, and having
supped on the newspaper supply, he continued the feast in _Henry Dunbar,_
the novel he had brought with him in his bag. There was something like a
murder! It was so exciting as to detach Pocket Upton from the flying
buttercups and daisies, from the reek of the smoking carriage, the real
crimes in the paper, and all thoughts of London until he found himself
there too soon.

The asthma specialist was one of those enterprising practitioners whose
professional standing is never quite on a par with their material success.
The injurious discrepancy may have spoilt his temper, or it may be that
his temper was at the root of the pr