The Pothunters quotes

Mr. W. P. Ross proceeded to the farther corner of the ring, where he sat down and was vigorously massaged by his two seconds. Tony took the opposite corner and submitted himself to the same process.

It is a very cheering thing at any time to have one’s arms and legs kneaded like bread, and it is especially pleasant if one is at all nervous.

It sends a glow through the entire frame. Like somebody’s something it is both grateful and comforting.

A rapid exchange of blows, and the end came. Allen lashed out with his left. Tony ducked sharply, and brought his right across with every ounce of his weight behind it, fairly on to the point of the jaw.

The right cross-counter is distinctly one of those things which it is more blessed to give than to receive.

Allen collapsed.

He had news. He had great news. He was bursting with news, and he hailed the approach of Tony and Welch with pleasure. With any other leading light of the School he might have felt less at ease, but with Tony it was different.

When you have underdone a fellow’s eggs and overdone his toast and eaten the remainder for a term or two, you begin to feel that mere social distinctions and differences of age no longer form a barrier.

Besides, he had news which was absolutely fresh, news to which no one could say pityingly: “What! Have you only just heard that!”

This was better than he had looked for. Not only were they unaware of the burglary, but they had not even an idea as to the recent event which had made the first room so fit a hunting ground for the burgling industry.

There are few pleasures keener than the pleasure of telling somebody something he didn’t know before.

“Great Scott,” he remarked, “haven’t you heard? No, of course you went up to Aldershot before they did it. By Jove.”

And as they had all been late the day before and the day before that, they were presented, on arrival, by their generous form master with 200 lines apiece.

Which shows more than ever how wrong it is to bet.

The news continuing to circulate, by the end of morning school it was generally known that a gang of desperadoes, numbering at least a hundred, had taken the Pavilion down, brick by brick, till only the foundations were left standing, and had gone off with …

He could hardly have chosen a worse formula.

The question has on most people precisely the same effect as that which the query, “Do you know where you lost it?” has on one who is engaged in looking for mislaid property.

“Nothing,” said Reade. Probably at the same moment hundreds of other people were making the same reply, in the same tone of voice, to the same question.

Reade walked off without replying, and

Barrett went to his place feeling that curiosity was a fraud, and resolving to confine his attentions for the future to Dignity.

This was byproduct number one of the Pavilion burglary.

“Hope it didn’t want an answer,” he said to Jim after school. “

Constant practice has made Thompson a sort of amateur lynx.

”

Jim had sounded him on the subject and had met with the reply,

“Kill my father and burn my ancestral home, and I will look on and smile. But touch these notes and you rouse the British Lion.”

After which he had given up the borrowing idea.

Then it dawned upon him that the man was running away from him, not towards him. His first impulse was to give chase, but prudence restrained him.

Catching burglars is an exhilarating sport, but it is best to indulge in it when one is not on a burgling expedition oneself.

Besides he had come out to get his book, and business is business.

His first impulse was to give chase, but prudence restrained him. Catching burglars is an exhilarating sport, but it is best to indulge in it when one is not on a burgling expedition oneself.

Besides he had come out to get his book, and business is business.

There was no time to be lost now, for someone might have heard one or both of the noises and given the alarm.

“Can’t you see him getting round the Old Man? ‘A capital lad at heart, I am sure, distinctly a capital lad, but thoughtless and headstrong, far too thoughtless for a position so important as that of head of my House.’ The abandoned old wreck!”

Tea put an end for the moment to conversation, but when the last sausage had gone the way of all flesh, Vaughan returned to the sore subject like a moth to a candle.

“It isn’t only the not being head of the House that I bar. It’s the man himself. You say you haven’t studied Plunkett much. When you get to know him better, you’ll appreciate his finer qualities more. There are so few of them.”

“Yes, he’s an awful man,” said Vaughan.

“Don’t stop,” said the Babe, encouragingly, after the silence had lasted some time. “It’s a treat picking a fellow to pieces like this.”

“I don’t know if that’s your beastly sarcasm, Babe,” said Vaughan, “but, speaking for self and partner, I don’t know how we should get on if we didn’t blow off steam occasionally in this style.”

Charteris and Welch were conversing in the study of which they were the joint proprietors. That is to say, Charteris was talking and playing the banjo alternately, while Welch was deep in a book and refused to be drawn out of it under any pretext.

Charteris’ banjo was the joy of his fellows and the bane of his Housemaster.

Being of a musical turn and owning a good deal of pocket money, he had, at the end of the summer holidays, introduced the delights of a phonograph into the House.

That was all. The School did the rest. The Glow Worm always sold well, principally because of the personal nature of its contents.

If the average mortal is told that there is something about him in a paper, he will buy that paper at your own price.

Today he was giving his monthly tea in honour of the new number. Only contributors were invited, and the menu was always of the best.

“It’s rather funny when you come to think of it,” said Tony. “

Welch lives on Bovril for, a month, and then, just as he thinks he’s going to score, a burglar with a sense of humour strolls into the Pav., carefully selects the only two cups he had a chance of winning, and so to bed.

”

“

The only reason he doesn’t drink gin and play billiards at the Blue Lion is that gin makes him ill and his best break at pills is six, including two flukes.

”

Offended dignity must draw the line somewhere. That is one of the curious results of a polite education. When two gentlemen of Hoxton or the Borough have a misunderstanding, they address one another with even more freedom than is their usual custom.

When one member of a public school falls out with another member, his politeness in dealing with him becomes so Chesterfieldian, that one cannot help being afraid that he will sustain a strain from which he will never recover.

After a time the tension became too much for Barrett. He picked up his cap and left the room. Reade continued to be absorbed in his book.

But then, so they were to the east along the Badgwick road. He wavered, but a recollection that there was water in the Badgwick direction, and that he might with luck beard a water wagtail in its lair, decided him.

What is life without a water wagtail’s egg? A mere mockery.

He turned east.

The first match he struck promptly and naturally went out.

No first match ever stays alight for more than three-fifths of a second.

The second was more successful. The sudden light dazzled him for a moment. When his eyes had grown accustomed to it, the match went out. He lit a third, and this time he saw all round the little chamber.

In the first place if they had separated, they must have gone different ways. It did not take him long to arrive at that conclusion. The odds, therefore, were that one had gone to the right upstream, the other downstream to the left.

His knowledge of human nature told him that nobody would willingly walk uphill if it was possible for him to walk on the flat.

Therefore, assuming the two keepers to be human, they had gone along the valley. Therefore, his best plan would be to make straight for the top of the hill, as straight as he could steer, and risk it.

“Ah. Keepers don’t like trespassers.

Curious thing⁠—don’t know if it ever occurred to you⁠—if there were no trespassers, there would be no need for keepers. To their interest, then, to encourage trespassers.

But do they?”

“College!” said Barrett with a convulsive shudder.

The most deadly error mortal man can make, with the exception of calling a school a college, is to call a college a school.

“College!” said the man. “Is this the road?”

“Right,” said Barrett, “I will.”

The process of concealing one’s superior knowledge is very irritating. So irritating, indeed, that very few people do it.

Barrett, however, was obliged to by necessity. He had a good chance of displaying his abilities in that direction when he met Grey the next morning.

On the borderline between these two castes came Mr. Thompson, the Master of the Sixth Form, spelt with a p and no relation to the genial James or the amiable Allen, with the former of whom, indeed, he was on very indifferent terms of friendship.

Mr. Thompson, though an excellent classic, had no knowledge of the inwardness of the Human Boy.

He expected every member of his form not only to be earnest—which very few members of a Sixth Form are—but also to communicate his innermost thoughts to him.

Sports weather at St. Austin’s was as a rule a quaint but unpleasant solution of mud, hail, and iced rain.

These were taken as a matter of course, and the School counted it as something gained when they were spared the usual cutting east wind.

… grounds, while in the centre of the ring the band of the local police force—the military being unavailable owing to exigencies of distance—were seating themselves with the grim determination of those who know that they are going to play the soldiers’ chorus out of Faust.

The band at the Sports had played the soldiers’ chorus out of Faust every year for decades past, and will in all probability play it for decades to come.

The Sports at St. Austin’s were always looked forward to by everyone with the keenest interest, and when the day arrived, were as regularly voted slow. In all school sports there are too many foregone conclusions.

Could he reach it before Drake? Or would he collapse before he reached it? There were only five more yards to go now, and still he led. Four. Three. Two.

Then something white swept past him on the right, the white line quivered, snapped, and vanished, and he pitched blindly forward on to the turf at the trackside. Drake had won by a foot.

“Without suggesting that you are guilty of this thing, I think I ought to tell you that if you have any confession to make, it will be greatly, very greatly, to your own advantage to make it at once.”

“And give myself away, free, gratis and for nothing,” thought Jim. “Not for me, thank you.”

“Might I hear Mr. Thompson’s evidence, sir?” he asked.

He was getting very near to the end of his tether, was J. Thomson of Merevale’s. It seemed to him, indeed, that he had reached it already.

Possibly if he had had a clearer conscience and a larger experience, he might have recognised that the evidence which Mr. Thompson had described as conclusive, was in reality not strong enough to hang a cat on.

Unfortunately, he did not enjoy those advantages.

Plunkett collapsed into a seat. His eye had caught sight of the smoking apparatus on the table.

The Head paced the room, something after the fashion of the tiger at the zoo, whose clock strikes lunch.

“Plunkett,” he said, suddenly, “you are a School prefect.”

(A hasty word in the reader’s ear.

If ever you are accused of smoking, please⁠—for my sake, if not for your own⁠—try to refrain from saying that your father lets you do it at home. It is a fatal mistake.

)

“Oh!” said Dallas. It was an uncomfortable moment. He felt that at least some conventional expression of regret ought to proceed from him.

“Don’t trouble to lie about being sorry,” said Plunkett with a sneer.

“Thanks,” said Dallas, gratefully, “since you mention it, I rather think I won’t.”

“Don’t trouble to lie about being sorry,” said Plunkett with a sneer.

“Thanks,” said Dallas, gratefully, “since you mention it, I rather think I won’t.”

“What!” he cried, as he read it. “Impossible.”

Parker made no comment. He stood in the doorway, trying to look as like a piece of furniture as possible⁠—which is the duty of a good butler.

“Impossible!” said the Head again.

The butler bowed his head gently, but with more than a touch of pained astonishment. He thought the Headmaster might show more respect for persons.

A butler is not an errand boy.

“Sir?” he said, giving the Head a last chance, as it were, of realising the situation.

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps on yonder haystack,” observed Charteris poetically

, as he and Tony, accompanied by Swift and Daintree, made their way across the fields to Parker’s Spinney.

“Sir to you,” said Charteris. “Look here, Babe, we want to know what you have done with Jim. He was seen by competent witnesses to go off with you, and he’s not come back.

If you’ve murdered him, you might let us have the body.

”

MacArthur’s who had either twisted their own ankles or known people who had twisted theirs.

The Head began to forget what exactly he had come to say that afternoon.

Jim lay and grinned covertly through it all. When the Head did speak, his first words roused him effectually.