I got the water from the canal.
Lemon-kali is delicious on a very hot day--so refreshing! But I
sometimes fancied I felt a little sick _afterwards_, if I had had a
great deal. And Bustard (who was always called Bustard-Plaster,
because he was the doctor's son) said it was the dragons out of the
canal water lashing their tails inside us. He had seen them under his
father's microscope.
The field where we played was on the banks of the canal, the opposite
side to the town. I believe it was school property. At any rate we had
the right of playing there.
We had to go nearly a quarter of a mile out of the way before there
was a bridge, and it was very vexatious to toil a quarter of a mile
down on one side and a quarter of a mile up on the other to get at a
meadow which lay directly opposite to the school. Weston wrote a
letter about it to the weekly paper asking the town to build us a
bridge. He wrote splendid letters, and this was one of his very best.
He said that if the town council laughed at the notion of building a
bridge for boys, they must remember that the Boys of to-day were the
Men of to-morrow (which we all thought a grand sentence, though
MacDonald, a very accurate-minded fellow, said it would really be some
years before most of us were grown up).
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