The very night after our company was thus dissolved the mayor was
knocked down at the foot of Swan Hill by the Town Wall, gagged and
trussed, and laid upon his own doorstep, where he was found by the
maidservant in the morning, having wrought himself to the verge of
apoplexy by his struggles to rid himself of his bonds. He besought
the captain with tears of outraged dignity to resume his
guardianship of the town; but the old warrior merely rubbed his
nose and spoke of rheumatism.
The outrages occurred only at intervals, and ceased altogether
during the college terms, when Dick Cludde was absent, so that we
were not far wrong in our inference that he was the fount and
origin of the deeds of lawlessness. The townsfolk, you may be sure,
did not love him; nor did the high and mighty airs Sir Richard and
my lady chose to assume in their dealings with the citizens win
them many friends; so that when it became known, about the time
when Dick left Cambridge finally, without a degree, that his father
had suffered serious reverses of fortune in his adventures in
oversea trade, there were few who felt anything but satisfaction.
At this time I was midway in my seventeenth year--a big strapping
fellow standing five feet ten, having quite outgrown the delicacy
of my childhood. I was high up in the school, on good terms with
the masters, though my Latin and Greek was never considerable: on
better terms with the boys, for, I must own, my inclinations were
rather towards baseball and quoits than towards the nice
discrimination of longs and shorts.
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