It had been asleep for years. It was now
waking up.
When the winter term ended, there were distinct symptoms of an
outbreak of public spirit in the house.
The Easter term opened auspiciously in one way. Neither Walton nor
Perry returned. The former had been snapped up in the middle of the
holidays--to his enormous disgust--by a bank, which wanted his
services so much that it was prepared to pay him 40 pounds a year simply
to enter the addresses of its outgoing letters in a book, and post them
when he had completed this ceremony. After a spell of this he might
hope to be transferred to another sphere of bank life and thought, and
at the end of his first year he might even hope for a rise in his
salary of ten pounds, if his conduct was good, and he had not been
late on more than twenty mornings in the year. I am aware that in a
properly-regulated story of school-life Walton would have gone to the
Eckleton races, returned in a state of speechless intoxication, and
been summarily expelled; but facts are facts, and must not be tampered
with. The ingenious but not industrious Perry had been superannuated.
For three years he had been in the Lower Fourth. Probably the master
of that form went to the Head, and said that his constitution would
not stand another year of him, and that either he or Perry must go.
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