OLD MOLE BEING THE SURPRISING ADVENTURES IN ENGLAND OF HERBERT JOCELYN BEENHAM, M.A., SOMETIME SIXTH-FORM MASTER AT THRIGSBY GRAMMAR SCHOOL IN THE COUNTY OF LANCASTER BY GILBERT CANNAN AUTHOR OF "ROUND THE CORNER" D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON 1917 Copyright, 1914. by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY TO MY WIFE _J'aime les fables des philosophes, je ris de celles des enfants, et je hais celles des imposteurs._ L'INGÉNU. CONTENTS PAGE I. PRELUDE 3 II. MARRIAGE 99 III. INTERLUDE 147 IV. TOYS 171 V. IN THE SWIM 203 VI. OUT OF IT 289 VII. APPENDIX 347 I PRELUDE His star is a strange one! One that leadeth him to fortune by the path of frowns! to greatness by the aid of thwackings! THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT I PRELUDE A SENSITIVE observer, who once spent a week in theatrical lodgings in Thrigsby, has described the moral atmosphere of the place as "harsh listlessness shot with humor." That is about as far as you can get in a week. It is farther than Herbert Jocelyn Beenham, M.A. (Oxon.), got in the twenty-five years he had given to the instruction of the youth of Thrigsby in its Grammar School--the foundation of an Elizabethan bishop. Ambition ever leads a man away from Thrigsby. Having none, H. J. Beenham had stayed there, achieving the sort of distinction that swelled Tennyson's brook. Boys and masters came and went, but "Old Mole" still occupied the Sixth Form room in the gallery above the glass roof of the gymnasium. He was called Old Mole because whenever he spied a boy cribbing, or larking, or reading a book that had no reference to the subject in hand, or eating sweets, or passing notes, he would cry out in a voice of thunder: "Ha! Art thou there, old mole?" Thrigsbian fathers who had suffered at his hands would ask their sons about Old Mole, and so his position was fortified by a sort of veneration. He was one of those men who assume their definite shape and appearance in the early thirties, and thereafter give no clew to their age even to the most curious spinster's inquisitiveness. Reference to the Calendar of his university shows that at the time of his catastrophe he cannot have been more than forty-eight.