Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England The Cock-House at Fellsgarth By Talbot Baines Reed ________________________________________________________________________ For some reason this book was quite hard to convert to e-Book, so that if any error is detected by a reader I would be grateful if I could be told, either by email, or by using our Bulletin Board. This is another story set in a nineteenth century boy's boarding school, and is quite similar to "The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's". At the time it was greatly acclaimed, and said to be very like a real boarding school, but things must have changed because I was at one such school only fifty years after this book was written, and I can't imagine any of it happening at my school. On the other hand I was also at a boarding school for boys aged 8 to 13, which was much more like the school in this story. As I say, things must have changed. It takes about ten hours to play as an audiobook. There are a number of quite tense incidents, particularly when a party of boys decide to walk up a nearby mountain, and the weather turns very nasty. This is in chapters 17 to 19. But there are many other well-described incidents, so do read the book, remembering that boys' slang has changed greatly in the past hundred years. ________________________________________________________________________ THE COCK-HOUSE AT FELLSGARTH BY TALBOT BAINES REED CHAPTER ONE. GREEN AND BLUE. First-night at Fellsgarth was always a festive occasion. The holidays were over, and school had not yet begun. All day long, from remote quarters, fellows had been converging on the dear old place; and here they were at last, shoulder to shoulder, delighted to find themselves back in the old haunts. The glorious memories of the summer holidays were common property. So was not a little of the pocket-money. So, by rule immemorial, were the contents of the hampers. And so, as they discovered to their cost, were the luckless new boys who had to-day tumbled for the first time headlong into the whirlpool of public school life. Does some one tell me he never heard of Fellsgarth? I am surprised. Where can you have been brought up that you have never heard of the venerable ivy-clad pile with its watch-tower and two wings, planted there, where the rivers Shale and Shargle mingle their waters, a mile or more above Hawkswater? My dear sir, Fellsgarth stood there before the days when Henry the Eighth, (of whom you may have possibly heard in the history books) abolished the monasteries and, some wicked people do say, annexed their contents.