he received on the first of April a packet of ‘stick-up’ collars as a present. Boys’ memories are generally short-lived. Nine days’ wonders do not last nine days in a school. Events follow each other with such rapidity and variety that neither successes nor defeats are long remembered. The nickname ‘Stick-ups’ adhered to Gerald Eversley for about five weeks, and then, as the original cause of it had disappeared after the first two or three days of the term, it dropped. The incident of the song was remembered a little longer; but its only permanent result was that the Sixth Form decided not to leave the choice of songs to the captain of Hall, but to prescribe a song of which a verse should be sung by all new boys, and after much consideration the ‘March of the Men of Harlech’ was adopted for this purpose as being at once simple, moral, and inspiriting. There came to be a tacit understanding among the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house that Gerald Eversley was not altogether like others, and that it was necessary to treat him differently from them, that he was a fair subject for good-humoured chaff, but that it was a ‘chouse’ to bully him, and that as Venniker (who was admitted to be a downright good fellow) could put up with him in his room, the boys generally could put up with him in the house. Harry Venniker wrote home to his father a long letter telling him that the ‘chap’ whom they had seen on the platform was in his house and in his room, that he was ‘awfully pious,’ and Harry doubted if he had ever been out of his nursery; that he had got himself into trouble by refusing to sing a song in which the word ‘damn’ occurred, and that Harry did not know what a boy was to do ‘with notions like that;’ but, added Harry at the end of his letter, ‘he is not such a bad fellow, though a terrible milksop, and if other boys are down upon him, I mean to stick up for him as well as I can.’ In addition, Harry said that he was ‘getting on all right,’ and life at St. Anselm’s was ‘good fun on the whole.’ Gerald Eversley, in writing to his father, made no allusion to the ‘trying of voices;’ he did not know whether he ought not to tell his father about it, but he could not make up his mind how to describe it, though he began it several times, but after fully describing the other incidents of his first days at St. Anselm’s, and especially his association with Venniker, he went on to say that he found school-life very different from his expectation, a great many things of which he had had no experience were said and done in it; he could not say he liked it at present, but he hoped he should come to like it better as time went on. Mr. Eversley read the letter more than once, then wrote _Gerald, No. 1_, on the envelope, and put it away in his desk by itself. CHAPTER V THE RIPENING OF FRIENDSHIP