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AFTER this curious meeting, Val paid several visits to the little corner house; so many, indeed, that his tutor interfered, as he had a perfect right to do, and reproached him warmly for his love of low society, and for choosing companions who must inevitably do him harm. Mr Grinder was quite right in this, and I hope the tutors of all our boys would do exactly the same in such a case; but Val, I am afraid, did not behave so respectfully as he ought, and indeed was insubordinate and scarcely gentlemanly, Mr Grinder complained. The young tutor, who had been an Eton boy himself not so very long before, had inadvertently spoken of poor Dick as a "Brocas cad." Now I am not sufficiently instructed to know what special ignominy, if any, is conveyed by this designation; but Val flamed up, as he did on rare occasions, his fury and indignation being all the greater that he usually managed to restrain himself. He spoke to Mr Grinder as a pupil ought not to

VOL. CXVI.-NO. DCCV.

have done. He informed him that if he knew Dick he never would speak of him in such terms; and if he did not know him, he had no right to speak at all, not being in the least aware of the injustice he was doing. There was a pretty business altogether between the highspirited impetuous boy and the young man who had been too lately a boy himself to have much patience with the other. Mr Grinder all but "complained of" Val-an awful proceeding, terminating in the block, and sudden execution in ordinary cases-a small matter enough with most boys, but sufficiently appalling to those who had attained such a position as Val's, high up in school; and intolerable to his impetuous temperament. This terrible step was averted by the interposition of mediators, by the soft words of old Mr Grinder, who was Val's

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