“Dumpkins! Dump-kins!” again he bellowed.
But Dumpkins only took an apple out of his pocket and began to eat it.
He is a hasty-tempered young man that master, and he strode toward the hapless Dumpkins and shook him angrily, exclaiming:
“Why don’t you answer when I call, you cheeky little beggar?”
“Please, sir, you never called me, sir,” expostulated the boy, wriggling in the master’s grip.
“Why, I’ve been shouting ‘Dumpkins’ all over the field for the last five minutes!”
“Why did you tell me Jones’s name was Dumpkins, you, Peter?” the master indignantly demanded of Tod some minutes later.
“I couldn’t have done that, sir,” said Tod, gravely, “for there’s nobody called Dumpkins in the school.”
It was this young master who rechristened the twins when Peter next day insisted that “a point has position but no gratitude.”
Strangely enough “The Merry Men” finds even greater favor with them than “Treasure Island,” and with the enigmatical decision of childhood their favorite of all the stories is “Markheim,” not “Will o’ the Mill,” beloved of critics. It is doubtful if they understand much of it, but nevertheless they read it over and over again to each other aloud, or silently with their curly heads pressed together, till they knew it by heart. To be sure, “Thrawn Janet” has a dreadful fascination for them, and they acted one of the principal scenes with somewhat direful results.
Peter made Tod “tie him by the neck” to the bed with red worsted, while Tod, in his character of the minister, had to creep in, candle in hand, to discover the dread spectacle; and Peter’s representation of the fearsome Janet was so truthful and blood-curdling that Tod dropped the candle and fled downstairs howling at the top of his voice, and such was his haste that he fell and sprained his wrist. Meanwhile, the candle had set fire to the valance of the bed, and altogether there was a fine hullabaloo; there was also an end put to their dramatic efforts for a week or two.
Nothing daunted, however, about a month later, on a Sunday evening when the servants were all at church, and their mother writing for dear life the long weekly letters that have to be written when a woman has husband and four sons scattered about the globe, Tod and Peter sought the seclusion of the kitchen and determined to “act” “Markheim.”