Page:Lorna Doone.djvu/33

Rh By this time the question of fighting was gone quite out of our own discretion; for sundry of the elder boys, grave and reverend signors, who had taken no small pleasure in teaching our hands to fight, to ward, to parry, to feign and counter, to lunge in the manner of sword-play, and the weaker child to drop on one knee, when no cunning of fence might baffle the onset—these great masters of the art, who would far liefer see us little ones practice it, than themselves engage, six or seven of them came running down the rounded causeway, having heard that there had arisen "a snug little mill" at the gate. Now whether that word hath origin in a Greek term meaning a conflict, as the best-read boys asseverated, or whether it is nothing more than a figure of similitude, from the beating arms of a mill, such as I have seen in counties where are no waterbrooks, but folk make bread with wind—it is not for a man devoid of scholarship to determine. Enough that they who made the ring intituled the scene a "mill," while we who must be thumped inside it tried to rejoice in their pleasantry, till it turned upon the stomach.

Moreover, I felt upon me now a certain responsibility, a dutiful need to maintain, in the presence of John Fry, the manliness of the Ridd family, and the honour of Exmoor. Hitherto none had worsted me, although in the three years of my schooling I had fought more than threescore battles, and bedewed with blood every plant of grass towards the middle of the Ironing-box. And this success I owed at first to no skill of my own, until I came to know better; for up to twenty or thirty fights, I struck as nature guided me, no wiser than a fatherlong-legs in the heat of a lanthorn; but I had conquered, partly through my native strength and the Exmoor toughness in me, and still more that I could not see when I had gotten my bellyful. But now I was like to have that and more; for my heart was down, to begin with; and then Robert Snell was a bigger boy than I had ever encountered, and as thick in the skull, and hard in the brain, as even I could claim to be.

I had never told my mother a word about these frequent strivings, because she was soft-hearted; neither had I told my father, because he might have beaten me. Therefore, beholding me still an innocent-looking child, with fair curls on my forehead, and no store of bad language, John Fry thought this was the very first fight that ever had befallen me; and so when they let him in at the gate "with a message to the head-master," as one of the monitors told Cop, and Peggy and Smiler were tied to the railings, till I should be through my business, John comes up to me the tears in his eyes, and says, "Doon't thee goo for to do it, Jan; doon't thee doo it, for gude now." But I told him that now it was much too late to cry off; so he said, "The Lord be with thee, Jan, and turn thy thumb-knuckle inwards."

It is not a very large piece of ground in the angle of the causeways, but quite big enough to fight upon, especially for Christians, who love to be cheek by jowl at it. The great boys stood in a circle around, being gifted with strong privilege, and the little boys had leave to lie flat, and look through the legs of the great boys. But while we were. yet preparing, and the candles hissed in the fog-cloud, old Phcebe, of more than fourscore years, whose room was over the