Prologue

Moncrief House, Panley Common. Scholastic establishment for the sons
of gentlemen, etc.

Panley Common, viewed from the back windows of Moncrief House, is a
tract of grass, furze and rushes, stretching away to the western
horizon.

One wet spring afternoon the sky was full of broken clouds, and the
common was swept by their shadows, between which patches of green
and yellow gorse were bright in the broken sunlight. The hills to
the northward were obscured by a heavy shower, traces of which were
drying off the slates of the school, a square white building,
formerly a gentleman's country-house. In front of it was a well-kept
lawn with a few clipped holly-trees. At the rear, a quarter of an
acre of land was enclosed for the use of the boys. Strollers on the
common could hear, at certain hours, a hubbub of voices and racing
footsteps from within the boundary wall. Sometimes, when the
strollers were boys themselves, they climbed to the coping, and saw
on the other side a piece of common trampled bare and brown, with a
few square yards of concrete, so worn into hollows as to be unfit
for its original use as a ball-alley. Also a long shed, a pump, a
door defaced by innumerable incised inscriptions, the back of the
house in much worse repair than the front, and about fifty boys in
tailless jackets and broad, turned-down collars. When the fifty boys
perceived a stranger on the wall they rushed to the spot with a wild
halloo, overwhelmed him with insult and defiance, and dislodged him
by a volley of clods, stones, lumps of bread, and such other
projectiles as were at hand.