I note that the dozen of the best shared by these two odd creatures
seems to have made them pals again. The proof is that though they began
the new half by messing with other youths they are now once more messing
together.
“That priceless young cub, W. W.,” occurs in one letter of
Tintinnabulum’s.
“W. W. is the lad for me,” he says in the next.
Again, I have a note of thanks for hospitality from W. W. in which he
remarks, “Tintinnabulum is as ripping as ever.” This, however, is to be
discounted, as, though the letter is signed W. W. Daly, I recognise in
it another hand, I recognise this other hand so clearly that I can add a
comment in brackets (3_d._).
Yes, I can do so (because of a game I have long been playing), but any
other person would be deceived, just as m’ tutor was at first deceived
by the epistles on the favourite walk. He told me that these were so
fragrant of W. W. that he had thought Tintinnabulum must be the
copy-cat. Indeed, thus it was held until W. W. nobly made confession.
What I must face is this, that Tintinnabulum, being (alas) an artist,
has been inside W. W. Not only so, he has since his return to school
been inside at least half a dozen other boys, searching for Collinses
for them.
A Collins, as no one, perhaps except Miss Austen, needs to be told, is
the fashionable name for a letter of thanks for hospitality to a host or
hostess. Thus W. W.’s letter to me was a Collins. Somehow its fame has
spread through his house, and now Tintinnabulum is as one possessed,
writing threepenny Collinses for the deficient. They are small boys as
yet, but as the quality of his Help is trumpeted to other houses I
conceive Fields, Blues and Choices knocking at his door and begging for
a Collins. It will be a great day for Tintinnabulum when Beverley
applies.
The Collins letter is a fine art in which those who try the hardest
often fall most heavily, and perhaps even m’ tutor or the Provost
Himself, at his wit’s end how to put it neatly this time, will yet crave
a 3_d._ worth. It may even be that readers grown grey in the country’s
service, who quake at thought of the looming Collins, would like to have
Tintinnabulum’s address. It is refused; but I mention, to fret them,
that his every Collins is guaranteed different from all his other
Collinses, and to be so like the purchaser that it is a photograph.
If you were his client you could accept Saturday to Monday invitations
with a light heart. But don’t, when he is at your Collins, go near him
and the babe lest he clutch it to his breast and growl. He has the great
gift of growling, which will yet make him popular with another sex.
His concentration on the insides of others is of course very disturbing
to me, but I should feel still more alarmed if I heard that he had
abandoned the monetary charge and, for sheer love of the thing, was
turning out Collinses gratis.
To-day there comes a ray of hope from a harassed tutor, who writes that
Tintinnabulum has deserted the Collins for googly bowling, the secrets
of which he is pursuing with the same terrific intensity. I can picture
him getting inside the ball.