The Project Gutenberg eBook, David Blaize, by E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

Title: David Blaize

Author: E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

Release Date: February 20, 2015 [eBook #48315]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAVID BLAIZE***

E-text prepared by Marcia Brooks, Cindy Beyer,
and the Distributed Proofreaders Canada team
(http://www.pgdpcanada.net)
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
(https://archive.org)

---

DAVID BLAIZE

---

 

 

BY

E. F. BENSON

 

AUTHOR OF “THE OAKLEYITES,” “ARUNDEL,”

“DODO,” “DODO THE SECOND,” ETC.

 

 

 

 

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

DAVID BLAIZE

DAVID BLAIZE

CHAPTER I

There was a new class-room in course of construction for the first form at Helmsworth Preparatory School, and the ten senior boys, whose united ages amounted to some hundred and thirty years, were taken for the time being in the school museum. This was a big boarded room, covered with corrugated iron and built out somewhat separate from the other class rooms at the corner of the cricket-field. The arrangement had many advantages from the point of view of the boys, for the room was full of agreeably distracting and interesting objects, and Cicero almost ceased to be tedious, even when he wrote about friendship, if, when you were construing, you could meditate on the skeleton of a kangaroo which stood immediately in front of you, and refresh yourself with the sight of the stuffed seal on whose nose the short-sighted Ferrers Major had balanced his spectacles before Mr. Dutton came in. Or, again, it was agreeable to speculate on the number of buns a mammoth might be able to put simultaneously into his mouth, seeing that a huge yellowish object that stood on the top of one of the cases was just one of his teeth. . . .

Of course it depended on how many teeth a mammoth had, but the number of a boy’s teeth might be some guide, and David, in the throes of grinding out the weekly letter to his father, passed his tongue round his own teeth, trying to count them by the sensory quality of it. But, losing count, he put an inky forefinger into his mouth instead. There seemed to be fourteen in his lower jaw and thirteen and a half in the upper, for half of a front tooth had been missing ever since, a few weeks ago, he had fallen out of a tree on to his face, and the most industrious scrutiny of that fatal spot had never resulted in his finding it. In any case, then, he had twenty-seven and a half teeth, and it was reasonable to suppose that a mammoth, therefore, unless he had fallen out of a tree (if there were such in the glacial age) had at least twenty-eight. That huge yellow lump of a thing, then, as big as David’s whole head, was only one twenty-eighth of his chewing apparatus. Why, an entire bun could stick to it and be unobserved. A mammoth could