John, who loved "dressing up," woke to life; even Richard began to see
daylight.

"That's not a bad notion, Judy!" he said briskly: "bags I Cromwell!
Larry, you can be Owen what's-his-name."

Larry came down like a shot bird from the sphere of romance to which
the poem had borne him.

"I hadn't thought of any scheme," he said, pulling himself together;
"I only wanted to give you a kind of notion of the rotten way
England's always treated Ireland--"

"But let's!" cried Christian; "let's act the whole book!"

Truisms are of their essence dull, but they must sometimes be
submitted to, and the truism as to a book's possible influence on the
young and impressionable cannot here be avoided. What it is that
decides if the book is to stamp itself on the plastic mind, or if the
mind is to assert itself and stamp on the book, is a detail that
admits less easily of dogmatism. The Companionage of Finn remained in
being for but two periods of holiday. Before the boys had returned to
school, it had seen its best days; the scheme for an armed invasion of
England had been abandoned, even the more matured project of storming
Dublin Castle was set aside; by the end of the Christmas holidays it
had been formally dissolved.

It is not easy to understand, it is still harder to explain what it
was in those fierce denunciations and complaints, outcome of that time
of general revolt, the "Roaring Forties" of the nineteenth century,