CHAPTER III
THE LAST STRAW

ITTLE John Summer had a new horn-book that cost

a silver penny. The handle was carven and the

horn was clear as honey. The other little boys stood round

about in speechless envy, or murmured their A B C’s and

“ba be bi’s” along the chapel steps. The lower-form boys

were playing leap-frog past the almshouse, and Geoffrey

Gosse and the vicar’s son were in the public gravel-pit,

throwing stones at the robins in the Great House elms
across the lane.

Some few dull fellows sat upon the steps behind the
school-house, anxiously poring over their books. But the
larger boys of the Fable Class stood in an excited group
beneath the shadow of the overhanging second story of
the grammar-school, talking all at once, each louder than
the other, until the noise was deafening.

“Oh, Nick, such goings on!” called Robin Getley,
whose father was a burgess, as Nick Attwood came slowly
up the street, saying his sentences for the day over and

over to himself in hopeless desperation, having had no
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