Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/30

18 affection. "And as for riding," he cried, "a pretty fellow that to talk of riding, when he doesn't know the difference 'tween a filly and a colt. He sits on an old white scrag-bones, jogs along the road at the rate of dyke water, and calls it riding. Put the fool on a horse and he'd be skull under the hoofs before he'd dug his heels in. The man's a coward, too. I've heard tales of the way he uses the birch only on the little boys. Why, if they'd any sense they'd all mutiny and kick him round the schoolhouse."

"You're very hard on the schoolmaster, Mr. Denis," said the girl.

"You don't like him, do you?" asked the boy seriously. "You can't!"

But the girl only laughed, for into the bar-parlour had come Mrs. Waggetts, accompanied by the gentleman under discussion, and followed by young Jerk, the potboy.

Jerry Jerk, though only a lad of a dozen years, possessed two excellent qualifications: pluck and a head like a bullet. He had got through his schooling so far without a taste of the birch: not that he hadn't deserved it, but the truth was—Mr. Rash was afraid of him, for he once had rapped the little urchin very severely on the head with his knuckles, so hard, indeed, that the blood had flowed freely, but not from Master Jerk's head—oh, no: from the teacher's knuckles—upon which young Jerry had burst into a peal of laughter, stoutly