It is no good for quakers, or any other body of men, to uplift their
voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they
don't follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own
piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better
world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn't be our
world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no
peace, and isn't meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk
fighting the wrong people and the wrong things, but I'd a deal sooner
see them doing that than that they should have no fight in them. So
having recorded, and being about to record, my hero's fights of all
sorts, with all sorts of enemies, I shall now proceed to give an account
of his passage-at-arms with the only one of his school-fellows whom he
ever had to encounter in this manner.
It was drawing towards the close of Arthur's first half-year, and
the May evenings were lengthening out. Locking-up was not till eight
o'clock, and everybody was beginning to talk about what he would do in
the holidays. The shell, in which form all our dramatis personae now
are, were reading, amongst other things, the last book of Homer's
"Iliad," and had worked through it as far as the speeches of the women
over Hector's body. It is a whole school-day, and four or five of the
School-house boys (amongst whom are Arthur, Tom, and East) are preparing
third lesson together.
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