The great affair of the tooth came on at the beginning of next term; and first I must tell you that next door to Dunston’s lived an old man, so frightfully ancient that his skin was all shrivelled over his bones. He didn’t like boys much, but he would look over his garden-wall sometimes into our playground and scowl if anybody caught his eye. Various things, of course, went over the wall often, and it was one of the excitements of Dunston’s to go into old Grimbal’s garden and get them back. Twice only he caught a chap, and both times, despite his awful age and yellowness of skin, he thrashed the chap very fairly hard with a walking-stick; but he never reported anybody to Dunston, and it was generally thought he regarded it as a sort of sport hunting for chaps in his garden. Of course, in fair, open hunting he hadn’t a chance, and the two he did catch he got by stealth, hiding behind bushes on a rather dark evening. Well, the facts would never have been known about this tooth but for Gideon’s mean spirit. It happened to be necessary for him to fight me, and though not caring much about it, he couldn’t help himself. Besides, though the champion of the Lower School, I was tons smaller than Gideon, and Gideon didn’t know till after the fight that I was a champion, the true facts about my greatness being hid from him. Just before the fight Gideon said: “Oh! my tooth, by the way. It may be hurt, and it cost my father five guineas.” So, to our great interest he unscrewed one of his two top front teeth and gave it to his second. You couldn’t have told it was a sham, so remarkably was it done, and it screwed on to the foundation of the original tooth much like a spike screws into the sole of a cricket-boot. Gideon had fallen down-stairs when he was ten and knocked off half the tooth, so he told us; but Murray, who is well up in science, said that all Jews’ front teeth are rather rocky, because in feudal times they were pulled out with pincers as a form of torture, and to make the Jews give up their secret treasures. Murray said that after many generations of pulling out Nature got sick of it, and that in modern times the front teeth of Jews aren’t worth talking about. Murray is full of rum ideas like that, and he hopes to go in for engineering, having already many secret inventions waiting to be patented. As to Gideon, I licked him rather badly in two rounds and a half. Then he was mopped up and dressed, and screwed in his front tooth again with the greatest ease.