Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and 
wondering, from the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he 
liked or hated him; it was easy to do either.

"It's not really your turn to cane," he said.

"I know it's not," said Comus, fingering a very serviceable-looking 
cane as lovingly as a pious violinist might handle his Strad.  "I 
gave Greyson some mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned or 
him, and I won.  He was rather decent over it and let me have half 
the chocolate back."

The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such measure 
of popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not materially 
help to endear him to the succession of masters with whom he came 
in contact during the course of his schooldays.  He amused and 
interested such of them as had the saving grace of humour at their 
disposal, but if they sighed when he passed from their immediate 
responsibility it was a sigh of relief rather than of regret.  The 
more enlightened and experienced of them realised that he was 
something outside the scope of the things that they were called 
upon to deal with.  A man who has been trained to cope with storms, 
to foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be 
pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself 
against a tornado.

Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger 
belief in their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had 
time permitted.

"I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your 
opportunities," a form-master once remarked to a colleague whose 
House had the embarrassing distinction of numbering Comus among its 
inmates.

"Heaven forbid that I should try," replied the housemaster.

"But why?" asked the reformer.

"Because Nature hates any interference with her own arrangements, 
and if you start in to tame the obviously untameable you are taking 
a fearful responsibility on yourself."

"Nonsense; boys are Nature's raw material."

"Millions of boys are.  There are just a few, and Bassington is one 
of them, who are Nature's highly finished product when they are in 
the schoolboy stage, and we, who are supposed to be moulding raw 
material, are quite helpless when we come in contact with them."

"But what happens to them when they grow up?"

"They never do grow up," said the housemaster; "that is their 
tragedy.  Bassington will certainly never grow out of his present 
stage."

"Now you are talking in the language of Peter Pan," said the form-
master.

"I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan," said the other.  
"With all reverence for the author of that masterpiece I should say 
he had a wonderful and tender insight into the child mind and knew 
nothing whatever about boys.  To make only one criticism on that 
particular work, can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys of 
any country that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing 
children's games in an underground cave when there were wolves and 
pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on the other side 
of the trap door?"

The form-master laughed.  "You evidently think that the 'Boy who 
would not grow up' must have been written by a 'grown-up who could 
never have been a boy.'  Perhaps that is the meaning of the 'Never-
never Land.'  I daresay you're right in your criticism, but I don't 
agree with you about Bassington.  He's a handful to deal with, as 
anyone knows who has come in contact with him, but if one's hands 
weren't full with a thousand and one other things I hold to my 
opinion that he could be tamed."

And he went his way, having maintained a form-master's inalienable 
privilege of being in the right.

* * * * *

In the prefects' room, Comus busied himself with the exact position 
of a chair planted out in the middle of the floor.

"I think everything's ready," he said.

Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in the 
Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected 
Christian to an expectant tiger.

"The kid is due in two minutes," he said.

"He'd jolly well better not be late," said Comus.

Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations in 
his earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the last 
ounce the panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed victim, 
probably at this moment hovering miserably outside the door.  After