Pigeon drew himself up. "You must have made a mistake; I--I don't remember you," he answered. "Oh! but we do you, very well, at Eagle House. I'm Jack Rogers, here's Murray. We two came together. You didn't leave, either, before us," said Jack. "Oh! you must remember all about it." "Ah! now I think I do," replied Pigeon, extending the tips of his fingers. "There was another fellow went to sea at the same time. Paddy something--Oh! ye-es, I remember." "Ah! Paddy Adair, you mean. Poor fellow, he was lost in the _Onyx_," answered Jack, in a sad tone. "Oh! I remember--he was always a harum-scarum vagabond," said Pigeon, in a sneering way. "He was as true a fellow as ever stepped!" exclaimed Jack indignantly. "If he were here, Pigeon, you would not speak so of him." The bully, as usual, was silenced. It was not Jack's way to cut anybody, but neither he nor Murray felt inclined to have any intimate conversation with their old schoolfellow. Still they could not help asking him about the school, and the various changes which had taken place since they left. "Well, I'm glad it prospers," exclaimed Jack. "It was a first-rate, jolly good school; there was no humbug about it. I spent many happy days there." Murray echoed these sentiments. Pigeon of course sneered, and observed that, "though there were a good many noblemen, and sons of gentlemen, there were a number of sons of merchants and city people." "Ah! that is just what there should be," said Jack. "It is the very thing that keeps England so well together. When the gentle born you speak of find that the sons of city men are as gentlemanly, as clever, and as honourable as themselves, and can play cricket or leapfrog, or anything of that sort, perhaps better than they do, they learn to respect them, and treat them as their equals ever afterwards. That is one of the very things that made our school so good. We used to think of fellows not for what they were but for what they did--except, perhaps, a few miserable sneaks, who `carnied' up to a fellow because he had a handle to his name." Pigeon did not respond to this sentiment, because he had been noted far doing the very thing that Jack reprobated. Jack could not help describing Pigeon in the berth, and the general opinion was that he deserved to be well roasted while he remained on board--in other words, that he should be made the common butt, at which the shafts of their wits should be aimed. They had plenty of opportunities of shooting the said shafts, for Pigeon exhibited an almost incredible amount of simplicity in all things connected with the sea. I do not mean to say, for one moment, that they were right in playing off their jokes on Pigeon. I have an especial dislike to practical jokes; and those I have generally seen carried out have been decidedly wrong, and very senseless and stupid, without a particle of wit.