him long to do startling things, and it made him do some foolish ones instead; hence his hard training for the mile, and his actual running when the time came. It made him feel that he had done less than nothing at school so far, that he was less than nobody, and yet that there was more in him than anybody knew; and now he wanted them to know it; and now he didn't care a blow what happened to him, or what was thought, at a school to which he had been sent against his will. There was no forgetting that at a time like this. If he was a failure, if he went on failing, well, at any rate it would be a score off those who had sent him there, and never gave him enough pocket money, or wrote him an unnecessary line.
So Jan came back to a very early position of his, only trailing the accumulated grievances of a year and a half; and by the third and last night of the fair he had the whole collection to brood upon, in gigantic array, in proportion the more colossal and grotesque because he could not and would not speak of them to a soul. And there was that fool Chips, jawing away as usual to anybody who would listen, about anything and everything except the sports.
"I shall be jolly glad when that beastly old fair moves on," quoth Chips after an interval of "Over the Garden Wall."
Jan agreed so heartily that he could scarcely hold his tongue.
"I don't know that I shall," said the new boy in Crabtree's corner. "It sounds rather jolly when you're dropping off."
Jan could have pulled every stitch off the little brute's bed. But the remark was very properly ignored.
"I suppose you know," said Bingley, "that two fellows were once bunked for going to it?"
