Talbot Baines Reed

“ Cripps, angrily; “a promise is a promise, and I expect young swells as makes them to keep them, mind that.”
“Oh, of course I’ll keep them, Cripps. What I was saying was that they don’t pay you the money till the beginning of each year.”
Loman omitted to mention, as he had omitted to mention all along, that young gentlemen who win scholarships do not, as a rule, have the money they win put into their hands to do as they like with. ”

“ While we have been talking to Oliver and Wraysford, and of the manner in which the results of the Nightingale examination affected them and the class to which they belonged, the reader will hardly have forgotten that there was another whose interest in that result was fully as serious and fully as painful. Loman had been counting on gaining the scholarship to a dead certainty. From the moment when it occurred to him he would be able to free himself of his money difficulties with Cripps by winning it, he had dismissed, or seemed to dismiss, all further anxiety from his mind. ”

“ That’s what you said three months ago,” replied Cripps.
“I won’t ask you again,” pleaded the boy; “just this time, Cripps.”
“Why, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, that you ought,” exclaimed the virtuous landlord of the Cockchafer, “a keeping a honest man out of his money!”
“Oh, but I’m certain to have it then—that is, next to certain.”
“Oh! then what you’re tilling me about this here Nightingale of yours is a lie, is it?” said the ’cute Mr. Cripps. “You ain’t got it at all, ain’t you?”
Loman could have bitten his tongue off for making such a blunder.
“A he? No ”

“ He never doubted that he in the Sixth could easily beat the two boys in the Fifth; and though, as we have seen, he now and then felt a sneaking misgiving on the subject, it never seriously disturbed his confidence. ”