TOM BROWN'S
this: you're very well out of this scrape. Don't you go near Thompson's barn again; do you hear?"
Profuse promises from all, especially East.
"Mind, I don't ask questions," went on Mentor, "but I rather think some of you have been there before this after his chickens. Now, knocking over other people's chickens and running off with them is stealing. It's a nasty word, but that's the plain English of it. If the chickens were dead and lying in a shop, you wouldn't take them, I know that, any more than you would apples out of Griffith's basket; but there's no real difference between chickens running about and apples on a tree and the same articles in a shop. I wish our morals were sounder in such matters. There's nothing so mischievous as these school distinctions, which jumble up right and wrong, and justify things in us for which poor boys would be sent to prison." And good old Holmes delivered his soul on the walk home of many wise sayings, and, as the song says,
"Geed 'em a sight of good advice"—
which same sermon sank into them all, more or less, and very penitent they were for several hours. But truth compels me to admit that East, at any rate, forgot it all in a week, but remembered the insult which had been put upon him by Farmer Thompson, and, with the Tadpole and other harebrained youngsters, committed a raid on the barn soon afterward, in which they were caught by the shepherds and severely handled, besides having to pay eight shillings, all the money they had in the world, to escape being taken up to the Doctor.
Martin became a constant inmate in the joint study from this time, and Arthur took to him so kindly that Tom couldn't resist slight fits of jealousy, which, however, he managed to keep to himself. The kestrel's eggs had not been broken, strange to say, and formed the nucleus of Arthur's collection, at which Martin worked heart and soul; and introduced Arthur to Howlett, the
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