rebels, "and
I kicked his shins well, I know." And soon it crept out that a lot of
the fags were in league, and Flashman excited his associates to join him
in bringing the young vagabonds to their senses; and the house was
filled with constant chasings, and sieges, and lickings of all sorts;
and in return, the bullies' beds were pulled to pieces, and drenched
with water, and their names written up on the walls with every insulting
epithet which the fag invention could furnish. The war in short raged
fiercely; but soon, as Diggs had told them, all the better fellows in
the fifth gave up trying to fag them, and public feeling began to set
against Flashman and his two or three intimates, and they were obliged
to keep their doings more secret, but being thorough bad fellows,
missed no opportunity of torturing in private. Flashman was an adept in
all ways, but above all in the power of saying cutting and cruel things,
and could often bring tears to the eyes of boys in this way, which all
the thrashings in the world wouldn't have wrung from them.

And as his operations were being cut short in other directions, he now
devoted himself chiefly to Tom and East, who lived at his own door, and
would force himself into their study whenever he found a chance, and sit
there, sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion, interrupting all
their work, and exulting in the evident pain which every now and then he
could see he was inflicting on one or the other.

The storm had cleared the air for the rest of the house, and a better
state of things now began than there had been since Old Brooke had left:
but an angry dark spot of thunder-cloud still hung over the end of the
passage, where Flashman's study and that of East and Tom lay.

He felt that they had been the first rebels, and that the rebellion had
been to a great extent successful; but what above all stirred the hatred
and bitterness of his heart against them, was that in the frequent
collisions which there had been of late, they had openly called him
coward and sneak,--the taunts were too true to be forgiven. While he was
in the act of thrashing them, they would roar out instances of his
funking at football, or shirking some encounter with a lout of half his
own size. These things were all well enough known in the house, but to
have his disgrace shouted out by small boys, to feel that they despised
him, to be unable to silence them by any amount of torture, and to see
the open lau