With their fellows they shook down, in time, into satisfactory fellowship. But the rules of the school, written and unwritten, from above and from below, were for a long time terribly irksome and almost past bearing. They were something like tiger-cubs transferred suddenly from their native freedom to the strict rounds of the circus-ring. They were expected to understand and conform to matters which were so taken for granted that explanations were deemed superfluous. And they suffered many things that first term in stubborn silence, mask and cloak for the shy pride which would sooner bite its tongue through than ask the question which would make its ignorance manifest. The milling-ground between the school and the racquet-courts knew them well, and drank of their blood, and proved the rough nursery of many a lasting friendship. Jim used laughingly to say at home that he had seen the colour of the blood of every fellow he cared a twopenny snap for, on that trampled plot of grass by the old courts. If the colour was good, and the manner of its display in accordance with his ideas, good feeling invariably followed, and he soon had heaps of friends. That was doubtless because he had nothing whatever of the swot in him. He delivered himself over, heart and soul, to the active enjoyments of life, and found no lack of like temper and much to his mind. Jack developed along somewhat wider and deeper lines. He had no great craving for knowledge simply as knowledge. But concerning things that interested him he was insatiable, and slogged away at them with as great a gusto as Jim did at his games. Jack's ideas of a correct school curriculum, being based entirely on his own leanings, necessarily clashed at times with those of the higher powers, and both he and Jim passed under the birch of the genial Vaughan with the utmost regularity and decorum. Neither, of course, ever uttered a word under these inflictions. Jack went tingling back to his own private preoccupation of the moment; and Jim went raging off to the playing-fields. "It's not what he does," he would fume to his chums, "but the way he does it. If he'd get mad I wouldn't mind, but he's always as nice and smooth as a hairdresser, and talks as if it was a favour he was doing you." "Oily old beast!" would be the return comment, and then to the game with extra vim to make up for time lost in the swishing. Jim's greatest fight was an epic in the school for many a year after he had left. "Ah!" said the privileged ones--whether they had actually been present in the body on that historic occasion or not--"but you should have seen the slog between Carron and Chissleton! That _was_ a fight!"