Читать книгу The Vagaries of Tod and Peter - L. Allen Harker - Страница 7

When the time came for those twins, Tod and Peter, to go to public school, their mother seriously considered the advisability of putting them into different “houses.” At first she thought that, perhaps, it might make for righteousness to separate them. But on hearing the subject mooted, they so whole-heartedly fell in with her opinion, rapturously reviewing the possibility of “changing houses” whenever they felt so inclined, that she instantly dismissed the idea; rightly coming to the conclusion that if their extraordinary resemblance was a cause of general muddle and mystification while they were together, it would become confusion worse confounded were they separated. Moreover, she reflected that even schoolmasters are men of like passions with ourselves, and rightly refrained from adding to such a one’s already heavy burden by a separate superintendence of the twins.

Tod and Peter, whose mental attitude was always that “all is for the best in the best possible of worlds,” decided that after all propinquity has its advantages, and rejoiced that family tradition sent them into a house whose head was proverbially the “slackest old slackster in the whole school.” A dreamy, mild-mannered, gentlemanly man that master, who left the management of the “house” entirely to an extremely energetic wife and a “young brusher” (“brusher” is the familiar term for master in that school), whose prowess in the playing-fields was only equalled by his extreme fussiness where rules of his own making were concerned.

“Not a bad chap,” the twins decided after their first week; “but a bit like the German Emperor, you know—wants things all his own way. Still, if you humor the youth, he’s all right.”

So successfully did they humor the “young brusher” in question that for the first month all went smoothly, and the house-master himself, a gentle optimist, ever ready to believe the best of boy-humanity, really thought that the “character” that had preceded them from preparatory school was perhaps over-emphasized.

Their late headmaster, while giving them full credit for general integrity and fair abilities, had, in mercy to his brethren of the craft, pointed out that they were ever “ready to join in frivolity and insubordination, when not under my own eye.” They had to work, for they were on the Modern Side, and destined for the army, and in that particular school, not the wiliest shirker in creation can escape the argus eye of the “head of the Modern,” or the retribution, swift, sharp, and sure, that follows any such line of conduct.

But, bless you! ordinary work and games, at which both were good, never found sufficient scope for the energies of Tod and Peter, and by the time the first month was up they began their tricks.

One Mr. Neatby, M.A., taught the twins chemistry. Not that they went to him together. They were in different, though, as far as work went, parallel forms, and finding that their systematic “changing” was never so much as suspected, and therefore carried with it no spice of danger or adventure, they gave it up, devoting their energies to the tormenting of Mr. Neatby, who had by his severity incurred their august displeasure.

Mr. Neatby was tall, severe, and dignified. He really liked his subject, but felt, as a rule, little affection for his pupils. Nevertheless, he was conscientious to the last degree in the discharge of his duties. His way of expressing himself was what Peter called “essayish”; he gave lines lavishly, and had but little mercy on the reckless breaker of test-tubes. He did not rant, or stamp, or call people by opprobrious names, as did many better loved masters. He was always cold, cutting, and superior. But the thing about him that most excited Peter’s animosity was his necktie.

“He wears revolting, jerry-built, Judas-like ties,” the indignant Peter proclaimed to an admiring audience of lower boys; “ties that slip down and show a beastly, brassy stud. His socks, too, leave much to be desired; in fact, his extremities altogether are such as betoken a bad, hard heart.”

“Let me see,” said Tod softly, looking up from a book he was reading; “do you think that a sending might soften the man’s hard heart?”

At this particular stage of the twins’ career, Mr. Kipling was the God of their idolatry, and both of them had “gloated,” even in the manner of the immortal “Stalky” himself, over the vengeance of Ram Das.

“It might be managed,” Peter answered, thoughtfully scratching his smooth chin; “but then again, it may be close-time for kittens just at present; don’t they generally bloom in the spring?”

“There’s always plenty of kittens, you juggins,” ejaculated a prosaic friend. “Why, when I was down at the riding school this morning, there was a cat with six in an empty loose-box; they’ll have to drown five of ’em, they told me. D’your people want one or what?”

“I want one,” Peter rejoined excitedly; “not one, but five, to give to a dear friend.”

“Shouldn’t think he’d be your dear friend long.”

“Oh, yes, he will. He’s an S.P.C.K., or whatever it is. He’s awfully profane—humane, I mean.”

“Well,” said the other boy, still unconvinced; “you can ask about ’em when you go for your lesson to-morrow morning. They weren’t half bad little beasts, but I shouldn’t advise you to give your friend more than one at a time, anyhow.”

Both Tod and Peter went twice a week to the riding school in the town, as they were both destined for cavalry. Every underling about the place knew them well, and liked them. Their father had lived in the town during his last leave, jobbed his horses at the riding-master’s stables, and had himself assisted at the lessons of elder brothers of Tod and Peter.

Now there was at the school a certain Figgins, a generally handy man, or rather boy, who worshipped the ground the twins walked upon; and after their next lesson they and Figgins might have been seen holding long and earnest parley in the loose-box containing the cat and kittens.

The twins laughed uproariously all the way home, and just as they reached the house, Peter remarked: “I hate anything dead. Figgins has promised not one of ’em shall be drowned, and when they’re fit to be moved, he’ll tell old White he’s found good homes for the lot. And then—and then Tod, my boy! our dear teacher shall have ’em alive, ‘alive, all alive oh! alive, all alive oh!’” and Peter burst into song in the exuberance of his joy.

Mr. Neatby lived in lodgings within a convenient distance of the school. He was therefore spared any intercourse with the boys after school hours, and usually spent his evenings in correcting innumerable marble-boarded exercise books, containing chemistry notes. He was so engaged one evening about nine o’clock, when his landlady entered the room and laid a square parcel at his elbow.

He finished correcting the book he had in hand, and took another, when his attention was arrested by an indescribable sound.

Mr. Neatby lifted his head and gazed about the room. “Could it be a mouse under the skirting-board?” he wondered. Then half unconsciously his eyes fell on the parcel his landlady had brought into the room. It was an oblong cardboard box, about the size of an ordinary shoe-box. But, although tied up with string, it was not wrapped in paper, and on looking at it more closely, Mr. Neatby discovered that the top was riddled with small holes.

Had it been summer, he, being something of a naturalist, would have at once concluded that someone had sent him some rare caterpillars, but what caterpillars are to be found in November?

He drew the parcel toward him, and there arose that curious sound again, louder and more insistent. He hastily cut the string and removed the lid of the box, and inside, reposing on a nest of hay, lay a very young and mewey kitten. A kitten who most evidently was homesick and aggrieved at being reft from the maternal bosom. A sprawly, squirmy, noisy kitten, that immediately proceeded to climb out of the box and crawl uncertainly to Mr. Neatby’s blotting-pad, where it collapsed into a dismal little heap, mewing louder than ever.

“There must be some mistake,” muttered Mr. Neatby, flushed and perturbed. “No one would send me a kitten; that stupid woman must have made some muddle or other,” and he arose hastily and rang the bell.

He so rarely rang his bell after his modest supper had been cleared away that Mrs. Vyner, his landlady, had given up expecting him to do so, and had on this occasion “just stepped out,” as she would have put it, to see a neighbor.

Mr. Neatby rang, and rang in vain, finally so far departing from his decorously distant demeanor as to go to the top of the kitchen stairs and shout. But the faint mewing of the kitten was the only answer to his outcries, and baffled and annoyed he returned to his sitting-room to find that the kitten had upset the red ink over Tod’s chemistry notes, which, in company with many others, lay open on the table, and was feebly attempting to lap it up.

“Poor little thing; it’s hungry,” he thought to himself. And being, indeed, as Peter said, a very humane man, he lifted it from the table, and went to his sideboard to see if he could find any milk. He did find some in the cupboard underneath where it had no business to be, and pouring some into a saucer, laid it on the floor beside the kitten, who proceeded to refresh itself with commendable promptitude.

Then, as his landlady still made no appearance, Mr. Neatby bethought him of looking at the parcel to see whether the kitten had been left at the wrong house. But no; attached to the string was a label, clearly addressed in a flowing, clerkly hand, “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.,” followed by his address, accurate as to number, street, and even town.

Once more he sat down in his chair, and leant his head on his hand to think, when he perceived, tucked into the hay at one side of the box, a card, and drew it forth hastily; a plain glazed visiting card on which was inscribed the words, “From a grateful friend,” in the same excellent handwriting as the label.

Mr. Neatby blushed, and looked guiltily at the happily supping kitten. In addition to being humane, Mr. Neatby was also charitable, and there were many poor who had reason to be grateful to him. But as he always gave alms through a third person, and was one of those modest people who take care that their left hand knows not what the right hand doeth, he felt quite upset.

Presently he heard his landlady and her niece come in, and rang again.

“Who brought this box, Mrs. Vyner?” he asked, holding it up toward her.

“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure. It was dark when I answered the door, and a young man—leastways, I think ’e was young—simply give it into my ’ands and ran down the steps again. I ’eld it under the gas in the ’all, sir, and read the label, as it was for you right enough, so I brings it in and lays it down without never interruptin’ you, sir, like you said.”

“There was a kitten in that box,” Mr. Neatby said solemnly, in such a tone as might have announced some national calamity.

“Sakes alive! you don’t say so, sir,” cried Mrs. Vyner in great excitement; “shall you keep it, sir?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mr. Neatby said gravely; “it must stay here for to-night anyway.”

“It’s a pretty little thing, sir,” said the landlady, stooping down to look at it where it lay basking in the heat of the fire. “’Twould be company for you, wouldn’t it, sir?”

“Hadn’t it better go with you to the kitchen for to-night, Mrs. Vyner?” Mr. Neatby asked persuasively, and Mrs. Vyner, with many protestations of wonder, gathered up the kitten into her apron and departed to the lower regions, where she informed the niece who lived with her that their lodger “’adn’t spoken so many words to ’er never before, no, not in a month of Sundays.”

Mr. Neatby threw the box into his capacious waste-paper basket, but he put the card and label carefully away in one of the pigeon-holes of his desk.

Next day, on his return from morning school, he found a white cardboard hat-box, big enough to contain the most umbrageous matinée hat ever worn, set right in the middle of his table, and he felt distinctly annoyed. His landlady followed him into the sitting-room to lay lunch, and he, pointing to the offending box, said coldly: “I must ask you not to leave your parcels in my room, Mrs. Vyner.”

Mrs. Vyner bridled, and seizing the box, held it out toward him, remarking aggrievedly: “If so be as you refers to this ’ere, sir, I must ast you to look ’oo it’s addressed to. It’s put plain enough for you, sir.”

“But I assure you,” Mr. Neatby cried, recoiling from the proffered hat-box, “that I haven’t ordered a hat of any kind.”

“Any’ow,” said Mrs. Vyner scornfully, “I don’t suppose, sir, as you’d order your ’ats from Madame Looeese, if you ’ad. I thought per’aps you’d bought a present for your young lady.”

“Mrs. Vyner,” replied Mr. Neatby, in a voice glacial as liquid air itself, “you forget yourself.”

Mrs. Vyner set down the box with an angry thump, and proceeded to lay the cloth in injured silence.

When she had gone, Mr. Neatby approached the mysterious package delicately, much as though it had been an infernal machine of some sort, and regarded it searchingly on all sides. It most certainly emanated from the millinery establishment of “Madame Louise,” but was none the less certainly addressed in sprawly, feminine handwriting to “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.”

Just then Mrs. Vyner opened the door, saying waspishly, “’Ere’s your kitting, sir; it keeps getting under my feet while I’m dishin’ up.”

It seemed to have gained considerable vigor during the night, for it rushed across the room and up the curtain.

But Mr. Neatby had screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and even the tempestuous entry of the kitten could not turn him from his purpose. Penknife in hand, he cut the string of the bonnet-box, and lifted the lid timidly, prepared no doubt for some tissue-paper protected “confection” within. When, lo! even as that of the shoe-box on the previous night was this interior; hay, dry and fragrant of stable, met his astonished gaze, while seated in its midst was a tabby kitten, who gathered herself together for a spring the instant the lid was lifted, and sprang with such good-will as to turn the box over on its side, when she immediately dashed under the table.

Mr. Neatby gazed, as if hypnotized, at the tumbled box, till the rattling of dishes outside warned him of the near approach of his landlady with lunch, and roused him from his trance.

He stooped hastily, thrust the scattered hay into the band-box, clapped on the lid, and placed it under the knee-hole of his writing-table.

The door was opened rather suddenly to admit Mrs. Vyner; kitten number one descended from the curtain, and Mr. Neatby found himself almost praying that kitten number two would stay under the table while his landlady was in the room. Mrs. Vyner glanced disdainfully in the direction of the band-box, noted that the string had been cut, set the dishes on the table with somewhat unnecessary violence, and departed without having opened her lips, just as the two kittens frisked out from beneath the table.

Mr. Neatby, harrassed and flushed “all over his eminent forehead,” did not begin his lunch. He went back to the band-box again, studied the label anew, and finally rummaged in the hay inside.

His search was rewarded by the discovery of a rather dirty piece of paper, on which was written “A Present from Framilode,” Framilode being a village in the neighborhood, celebrated for the manufacture of a certain kind of mug which always bore that legend. He put it carefully beside the other card and label in his desk, and returned to his lunch with but small appetite, and a frown of perplexity upon his brow. The kittens set up a perfect chorus of mewing; Mr. Neatby braced himself to explain the new arrival to Mrs. Vyner, and rang for the pudding.

“It’s my belief, sir,” said Mrs. Vyner that evening, “that somebody’s a puttin’ a ’oaf upon you. I sent my niece to that there Madame Looeese’s with the box lid, an’ she see madame ’erself, and she says as it’s a hold box, an’ that they certainly never sent you no box, nor wouldn’t think of such a liberty, and you one of the school gentlemen and all. But my niece, she said as madame did laugh when she ’eard about the kitten, and ’er young ladies, too.”

Mr. Neatby writhed.

To a man of his reserved and sensitive temperament, the reflection that his name could by any possibility be bandied about by a milliner and her assistants was little short of maddening. If he could then and there have ordered Mrs. Vyner “to take five hundred lines,” it might have given him some relief. But in all things he was a just man, and he knew that his landlady had at all events meant kindly in trying to discover the perpetrator of the outrage; for the fact remained that somebody had most assuredly “put a ’oax” on him in the shape of the liveliest of tabby kittens.

It never occurred to him to suspect any of the boys. For how could one of them come by either band-box or kittens? To be sure there were some day boys, but it happened that these were nearly all “on the Classical,” and Mr. Neatby had but little to do with them.

Of course he reckoned without the ubiquitous Figgins, who, unlike Mr. Neatby, had a young lady, who was employed by Madame Louise, and for whom it was an easy matter both to procure a disused band-box and a new label.

“You’re certain he got them all right?” whispered Peter to Figgins at his next lesson, as that worthy rushed forward officiously to settle the sack on the horse’s back. “He gave me back my notes simply smothered in red ink, and I thought I saw a mark like a kitten’s paw, but I couldn’t be sure.”

“Law bless you! yes, sir, ’e got ’em right enough. I took ’em myself, and wot’s more, both of ’em’s there still, for I passed by this mornin’ and ’appened to look down the airey, and there they both was as peart as print. I s’pose we’d better wait a day or so for the next ’un, ’adn’t us?”

“Yes, Figgins, wait two days till you see me again,” and Peter dug his knees into his horse and rode at the first jump.

“It’s rather decent of him to keep them,” thought Peter to himself, who was tender-hearted where animals were concerned. “Perhaps, if he doesn’t clap on any more lines for a bit, I’ll let him off with two.”

But, alas for good intentions. When Peter got back to the house, he found Tod bursting with indignation. For at “Practical Chemistry,” that very morning, Tod, who was supposed to be engaged in the manufacture of hydrogen, used so many conflicting ingredients as to cause an explosion and dense smoke, and a smell so appalling that it drove the whole class into the corridor, and caused several testy masters to send indignant messages demanding where the infernal smell came from.

Mr. Neatby, exasperated to the last degree, not only told Tod to take five hundred lines, but bade him return the very next half-holiday and spend the afternoon in doing similar experiments under his master’s supervision.

Tod confided his grievance to Peter at great length, and concluded his recital with the injunction, “Let him have all three, the beast! I wish they were young gorillas.”

Mr. Neatby was very busy. He was taking extra duty for a master who was ill, and for three or four days after the arrival of the second kitten really had not a moment to call his own, so, as Mrs. Vyner seemed to take quite kindly to the new arrivals—only taking care to charge her lodger an extra quart of milk daily for their maintenance—he almost forgot their existence.

By Saturday evening he had accumulated a mass of mid-term examination work to correct, and directly after supper set himself down to it, with four clear hours before him, for he often worked till after midnight.

His lamp was trimmed, his fire burned brightly, and one kitten, the first, sat purring on the hearth. That, and the scratching of Mr. Neatby’s pen as he corrected the generally mistaken views of boys as to the nature of an element, were the only sounds till there came a thunderous rap outside, and the door-bell pealed loudly.

Mr. Neatby frowned, but never looked up from his corrections. He had not been long at the school, and was not upon intimate terms with any of the masters, so that it was hardly likely to be a caller for him. He heard somebody open the front door, then some vehicle drive away. A moment later there was a knock at his door, and Jemima, Mrs. Vyner’s niece, came in, bearing a hamper.

“Please, sir, this ’ave just come by rail; there wasn’t nothing to pay.”

“Very well,” Mr. Neatby answered without looking up; “put it down, please; I can’t attend to it just now.”

Jemima did as she was told, and once more silence settled upon the room.

But not for long. Kitten number one got restless; it walked round and round the hamper, and sniffed and mewed, and mewed and sniffed, with irritating persistency. Moreover, a curious muffled echo seemed to accompany its mewing. Mr. Neatby bore it for five minutes, then pushed back his chair, caught the disturbing kitten by the scruff of its neck, and bore it to the top of the kitchen stairs, calling to Jemima to take it down. That young lady obeyed his summons, taking the kitten tenderly into her arms with many endearments; but all the same she remarked to her aunt, “Well, I do think as ’e might manage to look after one on ’em ’isself, that I do.”

Mr. Neatby went back to his papers and corrected with more vigor than before; but, in spite of his haste, in spite of his absorption, the muffled mewing continued.

At last he laid down his pen and listened. “Surely,” he thought, “it can’t sound like that from downstairs. I must have got the sound on my nerves; it’s really most annoying.” It was annoying; it grew louder and louder till it seemed at his very side.

Mr. Neatby was endowed with great powers, both of self-control and concentration. Having decided that the sound was in his imagination, and not actual, he went on with the paper that he was correcting, but as he placed it on the top of the growing pile he chanced to notice the hamper which was placed on the hearth-rug close beside him. “Apples, I suppose, from home,” he thought to himself; “but all the same, I’d better see.” He lifted it on to his knee. “Too light for apples,” he thought again. “What can they have sent?”

The lid was not very tightly fastened, and a slash or two of the penknife at the string restraining it brought it away.

Hay, and again hay, in this case forming the cosy nest of two kittens, one tortoiseshell and one black. Both lively and vociferous beyond either of their predecessors. Mr. Neatby ejaculated just one word, and sat perfectly still with the open hamper on his knee. The kittens climbed out and made hay among his papers, but he took no notice. “An angry man was he,” and when a man of his temperament is angry, he usually sits tight. The kittens got tired of the table, and jumped lightly to the floor, carrying a few dozen papers with them in their flight, but still Mr. Neatby sat on staring into space.

When at last he roused himself, he once more sought some solution of the mystery in the address label, but the yellow railway label on the back had been torn away, and only “ton” remained. The address itself was printed very neatly by hand.

Inside the hamper he found a little pink envelope with nicked edges such as servants love. He opened it, and printed by the same hand, on a piece of paper to match, was the following verse:

The kitten’s a persistent beast,

It comes when you expect it least,

It comes in ones, it comes in twos—

And when it comes it always mews.

“Ah!” Mr. Neatby said softly to himself, “some boy is at the bottom of this.”

The clock struck twelve, and he remembered with a start that both his landlady and Jemima would certainly be in bed.

What was to be done with the kittens?

He was far too kind-hearted to turn them out of doors on a cold November night. They were really uncommonly pretty little beasts, and as he watched their gambles he found himself quoting:

Alas! regardless of their doom,

The little victims play,

and then realized that they had no business to be playing at all at that time of night, and that he certainly wanted to go to bed.

He really was a much tried man that night. First, he had to catch the kittens and put them in the hamper, and as fast as he put one in, the other jumped out. This took some time. Then he carried the hamper up to bed with him, the kittens making frantic efforts to escape the while. And when at last he did get to bed, he had to get up again to let them out of the hamper, for they made such a frightful din no mortal could sleep. They finally elected to settle down on Mr. Neatby’s bed, and in the morning one of them ungratefully scratched his nose because he happened to move when the kitten in question chose to walk over his face.

When at last he arose from very broken slumbers, the black kitten upset the shaving water and scalded its foot, and made a dreadful uproar, and the tortoiseshell, while investigating the mantelpiece, upset and threw into the grate a blue vase belonging to Mrs. Vyner.

In chapel on Sunday morning, Tod and Peter noted gleefully the long scratch on “old Stinks’” nose (“Stinks” being, I regret to say, the name by which Mr. Neatby was known among his pupils). And curiosity as to how he was getting on with his rapidly increasing family of cats consumed them. In the afternoon they walked up and down the road outside his lodgings for nearly an hour, but nothing did they discover; for Mrs. Vyner’s windows were shrouded by white curtains, no one went in or out of the house, and all their loitering was not rewarded by so much as hearing a distant mew.

The fact was that Mr. Neatby had gone for a long walk to try and work off his irritation. That morning, while he was still at breakfast, Mrs. Vyner had appeared in his sitting-room, and somewhat stormily informed him that her “’ouse was not a ’ome for lost cats, nor never ’ad been.” And she concluded her harangue as follows:

“I’ve ’ad gentlemen, masters at the school, for twelve year come Michaelmas, and some ’ave bin trouble enough, the Lard knows. With their football and ’ockey, and ’ot baths in the middle of the afternoon, and the mud on their flannings something hawful; but a gentleman as surrounded ’imself with cats in sech numbers I never ’ave ’ad nor never won’t again, I ’opes and prays. And although it do go again my conscience to do it of a Sunday, I must ast you, sir, to take a week’s notice from yesterday. For start a fresh week with sech goin’s on, and cats a comin’ by every post as it were, I can’t; no, not if the king ’imself was to ast me on ’is bended knees.”

In vain poor Mr. Neatby pointed out that, far from “surrounding himself” with kittens, they were thrust upon him he knew not by whom or from whence. That he had no intention of keeping any of them if Mrs. Vyner objected, and that it would really be extremely inconvenient for him to have to seek new rooms in the middle of the term.

Mrs. Vyner was implacable. “I’m very upset about it, too, sir,” she answered, more in sorrow than in anger; “for I did think as ’ow I’d got a nice quiet gentleman, you not bein’ given to them ’orrid games as is so dirty, nor wantin’ an over amount of cookin’. But a gentleman as ’eaven appears to rain cats on like it do on you is not for the likes of me nor shan’t be. And though I’m truly sorry as you should be so afflicted, I must ast you to leave my ’ouse, sir, next Saturday as ever is, and that’s my last word.”

It wasn’t, not by a long way; for although Mr. Neatby reasoned, nay, even almost implored Mrs. Vyner to reconsider her decision, she would hardly let him get a word in edgeways, and remained unshaken in her desire that he should vacate her rooms. “’Ow do I know, sir,” she asked again and again, “wot hanimals may be sent you next? My ’eart would be in my mouth every time the door-bell rang.”

Truly, Tod and Peter had planned a fearful vengeance had they only known it. But they did not know it, and their unsatisfied curiosity was their undoing. On Monday morning at the riding school they arranged with Figgins that he was to leave the fifth kitten at Mr. Neatby’s rooms that afternoon, just before afternoon school finished. The despatch of the hamper had been managed by a railway man, a friend of Figgins, whose cart started from a parcel-receiving office close to the riding school, and he delivered the hamper on his evening round.

Directly school came out, the twins decided to rush down to Mr. Neatby’s rooms before lock-up, to ask some frivolous question about a paper he had set, and perhaps by great good luck be present at the unveiling of the end of the sending. All fell out exactly as they had arranged. Figgins took the parcel. Mrs. Vyner received it, addressed as before to “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.” (his real name was “Stuart,” not “Stinks”), carried it grimly into his sitting-room, and laid it on the table. She removed all her own ornaments from the chimneypiece and sideboard, and then went downstairs and brought up all four kittens (poor Mr. Neatby had not yet had time to arrange for their painless destruction), and shut them up in the room to await their owner’s return.

At ten minutes past five he hastened in, trod on one of the kittens as he entered the room, and struck a match to light his lamp. The kitten noisily proclaimed its injury, and the other three expressed their sympathy in similar terms. When he caught sight of the brown-paper parcel on the table he turned pale. The very feel of it was enough, and even before he had torn off the cover he was sure of its contents. Yes, in a common little bird cage was a fat, white kitten, and an uncommonly tight fit she was.

He did not attempt to let her out, though her position was plainly one of extreme discomfort, but stood with the cage in his hands, and the four mewing kittens about his feet, in so universally distrustful a frame of mind that he began to think that Mrs. Vyner herself was in the plot to victimize him.

The door was opened, and his landlady’s voice announced: “Two young gentlemen to see you, sir.”

Fresh colored and handsome, ruddy from their run in the cold evening air, square-shouldered and upstanding, Tod and Peter allowed their two pairs of candid blue eyes to travel from their master’s angry face to his hands, from his hands holding the caged kitten to his feet, where congregated the rest of the sending, and then exclaimed in a chorus of genial astonishment: “Why, sir, what a lot of kittens you keep!”

Now, although he had been at the school three terms, no boy had ever ventured to call upon Mr. Neatby before. Other masters might occasionally ask boys to tea or permit an occasional call out of school hours to arrange about house matches, etc. But he had ever discouraged any familiarity whatsoever, and that Tod and Peter should dare to intrude upon him at such a moment seemed to him, as indeed it was, a piece of unparalleled impertinence.

“What do you want here?” he asked angrily. “It’s after lock-up.”

“Mr. Ord gave us leave to come,” Peter said eagerly. “We don’t understand this question, sir. Could you explain? What a noise those kittens do make, don’t they?”

Now if Tod could only have refrained from looking at Peter, Mr. Neatby might have remained forever in the dark as to the mystery of the kittens. But, even as Peter spoke, Tod, unaware that the light from the master’s lamp shone full on his face, winked delightedly at his brother, and in a flash Mr. Neatby connected their unexpected and unnecessary visit with those equally unwelcome visitants whose advent during the past week had entailed so much annoyance upon him.

Taking no notice of the paper Peter held out toward him, he laid the little cage on the table, and said very quietly:

“Now that you are here, you will perhaps kindly explain what you mean by sending all these animals to me.”

“Us, sir!” the twins exclaimed breathlessly, and as usual in chorus—“Us!”

“Did you or did you not cause these five kittens to be sent to me?” Mr. Neatby asked again.

Dead silence.

As Tod said afterward, “It was one of those beastly yes or no questions that there’s no getting out of.”

“Did you or did you not?” Mr. Neatby asked again, a little louder than before, though even the kittens had ceased mewing and seemed to be listening. “But I know you did, and I wish to know further what you mean by a piece of such intolerable impertinence, and such wanton defiance of school rules.”

“There’s no rule about sending kittens, sir,” murmured Peter, with the least suspicion of a giggle in his voice.

That giggle broke down the last barrier of Mr. Neatby’s self-control. For full five minutes he permitted himself to thunder at those boys, finally bidding them take all five kittens away with them there and then.

“But we can’t, sir; we can’t take them back to the house,” pleaded Tod. “Whatever would Mrs. Ord say?”

“Well, you must take them away from here, anyway, and what’s more, you must give up the names of your confederates, that I may take proceedings against them for their unwarrantable interference with my privacy. Who were they, now? At once!”

“It’s absolutely impossible for us to do that, sir,” Peter said firmly, and Tod might have been heard to murmur something about “can’t and won’t.”

“Then,” said Mr. Neatby, “you will both come with me to the principal now at once.”

The principal of that school is one of the youngest headmasters in England, and he would not be the success he is did he not possess a sense of humor. He partially pacified Mr. Neatby; he vigorously “tanned” Tod and Peter there and then, and during the remainder of the evening he laughed to himself more than once.

For the remainder of the term Tod and Peter found their comings and goings so perpetually watched and suspected by the “young brusher” aforesaid, that even the rapturous recollection of the success of their sending was somewhat dimmed. But it was not they who suffered most; to this day Mr. Neatby suspects of sinister intention anyone who so much as mentions kittens in his presence, and new boys always wonder why their schoolfellows are so anxious that they should mew in the chemistry lectures. They only do it once.