Scarcely any one would believe that Bob Garnet, the best and gentlest boy that ever cried over Euripides—not from the pathos of the poet certainly, but from his own—Bob Garnet, who sang to snails to come out, and they felt that he could not beat them, should have been expelled disgracefully from a private school, whose master must needs expel his own guineas with every banished pupil. However, so it was, and the crime was characteristic. He _would_ sit at night in the lime–trees. Those lime–trees overhung the grey stone wall of the playground near Southampton; and some wanton boys had been caught up there, holding amoibæans with little nursemaids and girls of all work, come out to get lung–and–tongue food. Thereupon a stern ukase was issued that the next boy caught up there would be expelled without trial, as the corrupter of that pure flock. The other boys laughed, I am sorry to say, when “Bob, the natural,” as they called him, meaning thereby the naturalist, was the first to be discovered there, crawling upon a branch as cleverly as a looper caterpillar. Even then the capital sentence was commuted that time, for every master knew, as well as every boy, that Bob could never “say bo” to anything of the feminine gender capable of articulating. So Bob had to learn the fourth Georgic by heart, and did most of it (with extreme enjoyment) up in that very same tree. For he kept all his caterpillars there, his beetle–traps, his moth–nets, even some glorious pupæ, which were due at the end of August; and he nursed a snug little fernery, and had sown some mistletoe seeds, and a dozen other delicious things, and the lime–hawks wanted to burrow soon; in a word, it was Bobʼs hearth and heart–place, for no other boy could scale it. But just when Bob had got to the beginning of Aristæus, and the late bees were buzzing around him, although the linden had berried, an officious usher spied him out—a dirty little fellow, known and despised by all the more respectable _σιωπητέαι_ of Southampton. With hottest indignation, that mean low beggar cried out— “Boy in the tree there! I see you! Your name this moment, you rascal!” “Garnet, sir, Bob Garnet. And if you please, sir, I am not a rascal.” “Come down, sir, this very instant; or else Iʼll come up after you.” “I donʼt think you can, sir,” replied Bob, looking down complacently; for, as we shall see by–and–by, he was no coward in an emergency. “If you please, sir, no boy in the school can climb this tree except me, sir, since Brown senior left.” “I can tell you one thing, Garnet: itʼs the last time youʼll ever climb it.” “Oh, then I must collect my things; I am sorry to keep you waiting, sir. But they are such beauties, and I canʼt see well to pack them.” Bob packed up his treasures deliberately in his red pocket–handkerchief, and descended very cleverly, holding it with his teeth. The next morning he had to pack his box, and became in the school a mere legend.