Subsequently, Harry and I were taken into his confidence and made his operators, much to our gratification. Climbing-boys, indeed! It was become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and the world called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by his inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in Mrs. Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of the sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives would lay open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with the great sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing below, that Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with his authority, and put an end to the game. So, on us, black and joyous and inseparable, I will let down the act-drop of our little stage, to raise it on a later development of the drama I set out to record. END OF PART I. PART II. CHAPTER I. THE BADGER. It is with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression, that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now--an interval of five years having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse--the “shining morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the dawn of manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our extremely incipient moustaches. Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”--to put an extreme case--at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream, by whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late Commission, [_Reported in 1864._] are peculiar to this seminary of the gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and noble confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with in the person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of self-satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this prince among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason in the world.