They were considered
as exempt from the common frailties of schoolboy nature: no one ventured
to fix a limit to their power. Like the gods of the Lotus-eater, they
lay beside their nectar, rarely communing with ordinary mortals except
to give an order or set a punishment. On the form immediately below them
part of their glory was reflected; these were a sort of hemitheoi,
awaiting their translation into the higher Olympus of perfected
omnipotence.
In this intermediate state flourished, at the time I speak of, one
Joseph Baines, a fat, small-eyed youth, with immense pendent pallid
cheeks, rejoicing in the _sobriquet_ of "Buttons," his father being
eminent in that line in the Midland Metropolis. The son was Brummagem to
the back-bone. He was intensely stupid; but, having been a fixture at
---- beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitant, he had slowly
gravitated on into his present position, on the old Ring principle,
"weight must tell." I believe he had been bullied continuously for many
years, and now, with a dull, pertinacious malignity, was biding his
time, intending, on his accession to power, to inflict full reprisals on
those below him; or, in his own expressive language, "to take it out of
'em, like smoke.
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