"Wouldn't _He_ let you keep it if _He_ knew?" asked Ishmael, when, finger and thumb round its neck and another finger firmly gripping under a forepaw, he had held and admired the spitting animal. "Rather not. We're not allowed to _keep_ anything, though they make us sweat across the moor what they call 'observing the animal creation in its own haunts.' They like one to grind over beastesses and butterflies and suchlike." "I know a lot about them," boasted Ishmael. "Then you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, that's all I can say, or the fellows will think you're a prig. It was all right when it was started because the fellows were keen on it themselves, but then the masters took it up, and of course we had to drop it. We're off bugs in this shop." Ishmael digested in silence the profundity of the point of view thus presented to him, and, according to his habit, quickly made it part of his practice. For his first weeks at school he kept very silent, absorbing its traditions and the unwritten laws made by the boys themselves, on the nice observance of which hung respect and popularity. The Grammar School of St. Renny was an old-fashioned affair even for those days, but it had a certain name in a quiet way. It was run on classical lines, Greek and Latin being considered the only two subjects worth a gentleman's attention. Botany and entomology were the unofficial subjects that had won the school its name, but Ishmael soon found that to show any keenness for these two pursuits was to class yourself a prig. The robuster natures preferred rod and line, or line only, in the waters of Bolowen Pool to any dalliance with stink-pots and specimen cases. Like far greater schools, it was really run by the traditions evolved by the boys. There were certain things that were the thing and certain other things that were not the thing, and these varied occasionally. One term you simply had to wear a dark blue-and-white tie for going into the town and bear's grease your hair; another term a certain slovenliness in dress was the thing. You dismissed all womenkind as trivial and useless, but you were in love with the doctor's daughter, a stately, full-blown damsel who floated, so to speak, up the church upon the swaying bubble of her crinoline every Sunday morning, and sat, sunk to the waist in the swelling waves of silk, worshipped by a row of eyes from the school pew.