"Div ye think, Speug, ye could manage a piece of rock before ye go," and Bulldog produced the only rock that a Muirtown man will ever think worth eating--Fenwick's own very best, thick, and pure, and rich, and well-flavoured; and when Speug knew not whether to choose the peppermint, that is black and white, or the honey rock, which is brown and creamy, or the cinnamon, which in those days was red outside and white within, his host insisted that he should take a piece of each, and they would last him till he reached his home.
"Speug," and Bulldog bade farewell to his pupil at the garden gate, "ye're the most aggravating little scoundrel in Muirtown Seminary, and the devilry that's in you I bear witness is bottomless; but ye're fine company, and ye 'ill, maybe, be a man yet, and Nestie and me will be glad to see ye when ye're no engaged with yir study. Ye 'ill no forget to come, Peter."
Peter's tongue, which had been wagging freely among the rabbits, again forsook him, but he was able to indicate that he would seize an early opportunity of again paying his respects to Mr. Dugald MacKinnon in his own home; and when Bulldog thrashed him next day for not having prepared an exercise the night before, the incident only seemed to complete Speug's pride and satisfaction.
Bulldog's southern assistant had tried the patience of the Seminary by various efforts to improve its mind and manners, but when he proposed at the beginning of the autumn term to occupy Saturdays with botanical excursions to Kilspindie Woods, which, as everybody knows, are three miles from Muirtown, and a paradise of pheasants, it was felt that if there was any moral order in the universe something must happen. From the middle of September, when the school opened, on to the beginning of October, when football started, our spare time was given to kites, which we flew from the North Meadow in the equinoctial gales gloriously. Speug had one of heroic size, with the figure of a dragon upon it painted in blue and yellow and red--the red for the fire coming out of his mouth--and a tail of eight joints, ending in a bunch of hay fastened with a ribbon. None but a sportsman like Speug could have launched the monster from the ground--bigger than Peter by a foot--and nursed it through the lower spaces till it caught the wind, and held it in the higher as it tore upwards and forwards till the dragon was but the size of a man's hand in the clear autumn sky. Then Peter would lie down upon his back, with his hands below his head, and the stick with the kite string beneath his feet, and gaze up at the speck above, with an expression so lifted above this present world that a circle of juniors could only look at him with silent admiration and speculate whether they would ever become so good and great.