“Dear, dear!” chuckled Mr. Barley, “five pounds! They may teach you young gentlemen to talk Latin and Greek and what not at your school, but it ’ud do a lot more good if they’d teach you how many beans make five; it ’ud do a lot more good if they’d teach you to come in when it rained, it ’ud do----” Mike was reading the letter. “DEAR MR. BARLEY,” it ran.--“I send the £5, which I could not get before. I hope it is in time, because I don’t want you to write to the headmaster. I am sorry Jane and John ate your wife’s hat and the chicken and broke the vase.” There was some more to the same effect; it was signed “T. G. Jellicoe.” “What on earth’s it all about?” said Mike, finishing this curious document. Mr. Barley slapped his leg. “Why, Mr. Jellicoe keeps two dogs here; I keep ’em for him till the young gentlemen go home for their holidays. Aberdeen terriers, they are, and as sharp as mustard. Mischief! I believe you, but, love us! they don’t do no harm! Bite up an old shoe sometimes and such sort of things. The other day, last Wednesday it were, about ’ar parse five, Jane--she’s the worst of the two, always up to it, she is--she got hold of my old hat and had it in bits before you could say knife. John upset a china vase in one of the bedrooms chasing a mouse, and they got on the coffee-room table and ate half a cold chicken what had been left there. So I says to myself, ‘I’ll have a game with Mr. Jellicoe over this,’ and I sits down and writes off saying the little dogs have eaten a valuable hat and a chicken and what not, and the damage’ll be five pounds, and will he kindly remit same by Saturday night at the latest or I write to his headmaster. Love us!” Mr. Barley slapped his thigh, “he took it all in, every word--and here’s the five pounds in cash in this envelope here! I haven’t had such a laugh since we got old Tom Raxley out of bed at twelve of a winter’s night by telling him his house was a-fire.” It is not always easy to appreciate a joke of the practical order if one has been made even merely part victim of it. Mike, as he reflected that he had been dragged out of his house in the middle of the night, in contravention of all school rules and discipline, simply in order to satisfy Mr. Barley’s sense of humour, was more inclined to be abusive than mirthful. Running risks is all very well when they are necessary, or if one chooses to run them for one’s own amusement, but to be placed in a dangerous position, a position imperilling one’s chance of going to the ’Varsity, is another matter altogether. But it is impossible to abuse the Barley type of man. Barley’s enjoyment of the whole thing was so honest and child-like. Probably it had given him the happiest quarter of an hour he had known for years, since, in fact, the affair of old Tom Raxley. It would have been cruel to damp the man.