It was a long, hard run home, over those five wet and freezing miles, and the boy's heart was heavy because of the loss of that pet gun. All the while he was learning everything that outdoors could teach him, and he owes to that breezy, sun-shot, storm-swept gipsying during the summer vacations the beginning of the stock of good health that has made him such a strong, useful, happy man, able to do no end of hard work without getting tired, and always finding it fun to live. II SCHOOL--AND AFTER This Robin Hood kind of life in the open went on till Wilf was fourteen. Then he was sent away to Marlborough College--a boy's school which had 600 pupils. Marlborough is in the Chalk Hills of the Marlborough Downs, seventy-five miles west of London. The building, dating from 1843, is on the site of a castle of Henry I. The first day Wilf landed there he looked about him and felt pretty forlorn. "I wonder if I'll ever get to know all those boys?" he asked himself. When he was at home, he had a room all his own or shared one with his brother. Here it was so different. He counted the beds in his dormitory. There were twenty-five of them. "How can a fellow ever get to sleep in such a crowd?" he wondered. "Perhaps they'll toss me in a blanket, the way they did in 'Tom Brown at Rugby.' Well, if they try anything like that, they'll find I'm ready for them!" He felt the mattress. "Pretty hard compared with the beds at home, but no matter. Let's see what the schoolroom is like." So he went into the "Big School" as it was called. Three hundred boys were supposed to study there. "Gracious!" exclaimed Wilf. "Don't see how a fellow ever gets his lessons in a place like this." It was as busy and as noisy as a bear-garden. Here and there a boy with his hands over his ears was really looking at a book. But most of the boys were talking, laughing, singing as if there were no such thing as lessons. Sometimes a master might look in, or a monitor would wander down the aisle. But most of the time there was nothing to keep a boy from following his own sweet will. "I say, Smith!" one called out, "lend me a shilling, will you? I want to buy Grisby's white rat, and I haven't got enough." A fat boy who looked as if he thought mostly of meal-times was telling everybody in his neighborhood: "I've just got a box from home. Jam and fruitcake and gooseberry tarts. Come and see me to-night in the dormitory, you fellows." Somebody else called out: "My knife's so dull I'll never get my name carved on this desk. Give me your knife, Willoughby: it's sharper." There were boys having fencing-matches with rulers across the aisle. There were others who took no end of pains to make paper arrows, or spitballs that would stick to the ceiling. In the corners of their desks might be bird's eggs in need of fresh air. Some of the boys were reading adventure stories, covered up to look like school-books.