The Bradshaw who appears in the following tale is the same youth who figures as the hero—or villain¹, label him as you like—of the preceding equally veracious² narrative³. I mention this because I should not care for you to go away with the idea that a waistcoat marked with the name of Bradshaw must of necessity cover a scheming heart. It may, however, be noticed that a good many members of the Bradshaw family possess a keen and rather sinister⁴ sense of the humorous, inherited doubtless from their great ancestor, the dry wag who wrote that monument of quiet drollery⁵, Bradshaw's Railway Guide. So with the hero of my story.

 

Frederick Wackerbath Bradshaw was, as I have pointed⁶ out, my contemporary at St Austin's. We were in the same House, and together we sported on the green—and elsewhere—and did our best to turn the majority of the staff of masters into confirmed pessimists⁷, they in the meantime endeavouring to do the same by us with every weapon that lay to their hand. And the worst of these weapons were the end-of-term examination papers. Mellish was our form-master, and once a term a demon⁸ entered into Mellish. He brooded silently apart from the madding crowd. He wandered through dry places seeking rest, and at intervals⁹ he would smile evilly, and jot¹⁰ down a note on the back of an envelope. These notes, collected and printed closely on the vilest¹¹ paper, made up the examination questions.

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