he other houses were more
or less jealous of the school-house, collisions were frequent.

After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know?
From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the
business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man.
Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be
they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in
high places, or Russians, or border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry,
who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.

It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their
voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they
don't follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own
piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better
world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn't be our
world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no
peace, and isn't meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk
fighting the wrong people and the wrong things, but I'd a deal sooner
see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them. So
having recorded, and being about to record, my hero's fights of all
sorts, with all sorts of enemies, I shall now proceed to give an account
of his passage-at-arms with the only one of his school-fellows whom he
ever had to encounter in this manner.

It was drawing toward the close of Arthur's first half-year, and the May
evenings were lengthening out. Locking-up was not till eight o'clock,
and everybody was beginning to talk about what he would do in the
holidays. The shell,[6] in which form all our _dramatis personae_ now
are, were reading among other things the last book of "Homer's Iliad,"
and had worked through it as far as the speeches of the women over
Hector's body. It is a whole school-day, and four or five of the
school-house boys (among whom are Arthur, Tom and East) are preparing
third lesson together. They have finished the regulation forty lines,
and are for the most part getting very tired, notwithstanding the
exquisite pathos of Helen's lamentation. And now several long
four-syllabled words come together, and the boy with the dictionary
strikes work.

[Footnote 6: _Shell_ is the name applied, in some public schools, to a
sort of intermediate class.]

"I am not going to look out any more words," says he; "we've done the
q