“D-doesn’t t-that help you to remember your name, New Boy?” said the boy with red hair persuasively. As he spoke he pressed his face so close to that of the quivering thing in his grasp that he almost rubbed the gaunt cheek with his blunt and freckled nose. The boy hung mute and limp with terror. “L-lost y-your tongue, New Boy?” said the boy with red hair. “Or perhaps you haven’t lost it really?” The arm that was still in the grip of the giant received another such twist that a wild shriek was heard all over the garden. The cry brought other boys crowding to the scene. They were of diverse ages and sizes, they were of various tempers and complexions, but one and all were animated by the same critical curiosity. Among them was a boy, who, although far more robust of physique, was slightly less in inches than he who cowered away from their eyes. He measured him carefully with his eye, and, seeming to derive an ampler power from such gross terror, turned to his companions with a swelling air, as if to enforce the fact that in stature he was somewhat the less of the two, and said, “I think I ought to be able to hit him.” With chin borne loftily, with each step taken firmly yet delicately, and with an air of dauntlessness which affected not to be in the least conscious of the approval such a deed was bound to excite in the minds of the intelligent, this boy approached, and at his leisure struck the new boy in the face with his clenched fist as hard as he could. A little afterwards the ringing of a bell summoned all the boys indoors to their books. The new boy crept back to his place at the master’s table in a kind of swoon. For the remainder of that day any command of the common faculties which, under happy conditions, he sometimes enjoyed, was destroyed. He could hardly see, he could affix no meaning to that which he heard; the functions of speech and memory were denied to him altogether. Whenever the school-master left the room he followed upon his heels from one place to another with the ridiculous docility of a dumb animal. At noon the mid-day meal was taken. Many of the scholars then adjourned to a long table in another room, but as the master followed them the boy kept ever by his side. An old woman who cut the food, and who seemed to wield great authority, said to him in a harsh voice, which made him tremble, “You have no right to sit there. Down there at the bottom is the place for new boys.” “No,” said the master, “let him sit with me.” During the meal the boy ate no food. When, having declined to touch a robust helping of meat, he also rejected an even more liberal serving of pudding, the old woman said to him roughly, “You must have a proud stomach if it refuses good food.”