Somehow, after my friendship with the Winstanleys I realized that in some subtle way the bond between my father and myself grew and strengthened. In the years which I had spent at my aunt's, though I had never ceased to love him, we had seemed in a very slight degree to have drifted apart, but since my visit to Marshlands all the old spirit of comradeship returned, and I felt he was even more to me than he had ever been before. I think I must have unconsciously expressed this feeling in my letters, for in his, too, I began to notice a change. He wrote back to me more fully and freely, not as to a child, but as to a friend, telling me his hopes and his difficulties, and the little details of his lonely days, and asking almost wistfully for a full record of all my doings. His gratitude to my kind friends knew no limit, yet I think all the same he felt it hard that he should miss those years of my life when I was receiving my most vivid impressions, and that he must leave to others the care he would so gladly have bestowed upon me himself. CHAPTER VI MISCHIEF "When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war." The celebrated Dr. Johnson is said to have advocated the theory, "When you meet a boy, beat him! For either he has been in mischief, or he is at present in mischief, or he is about to get into mischief!" In the case of the two younger Winstanley boys, I fear this axiom was only too true, since they sometimes allowed their love of fun to lead them into rather questionable undertakings, and I do not think their neighbours altogether appreciated the many jokes and escapades with which they sought to enliven the holidays. There resided in the village High Street a certain elderly bachelor, a retired sea-captain, of somewhat autocratic manners and a very great idea of his own importance. Dick and George had once ventured into his garden in quest of a runaway puppy, and had been met with such a storm of wrath from the fiery old gentleman, who threatened to prosecute them for trespassing, that they had carried on a kind of feud with him ever since. On the captain's side, I have no doubt, there were many reasonable grounds of complaint, but the boys, on the other hand, considered themselves to have just cause of grievance. Their enemy had been seen deliberately to wipe off the treacling mixture which they had smeared upon the trees to attract moths, though the said trees were situated on the public highway, and not on his private property; he had put an impassable fence of barbed wire round the particular field where specimens of the Clifden Blue might occasionally be captured, and he had clipped his brambly hedge, allowing the prickles purposely to fall and remain in the cinder-path below, though he knew it was the short cut by which they bicycled from Marshlands to the railway-station.