Clatter!  By an unintentional move of one arm Mr. Cantwell swept fully a hundred pennies off on to the floor.  He leaped up, flushed and angry.

“Will the young—–­gentlemen—–­aid me in recovering the coins that went on the floor?” he asked.

There was promptly a great scurrying and searching.  The principal surely felt harassed that morning.  It was ten minutes of nine when the last student had paid and had had his name checked off.  Mr. Cantwell was at the boiling point of wrath.

Just as the principal was putting the last of the coins into his satchel Mr. Drake leaned over to whisper: 

“May I make a suggestion, sir?”

“Certainly,” replied the principal coldly.  “Yet I trust, Mr. Drake, that it won’t be a suggestion for an easy way of accumulating more pennies than I already have.”

“I think, if I were you, sir, I should pay no heed to this joke-----”

“Joke?” hissed the principal under his breath.  “It’s an outrage!”

“But intended only as a piece of pleasantry, sir.  So I think it will pass off much better if you don’t allow the students to see that they have annoyed you.”

“Why?  Do the students want to annoy me?” demanded Mr. Cantwell, in another angry undertone.

“I wouldn’t say that,” replied Mr. Drake.  “But, if the young men discover that you are easily teased, they are sufficiently mischief-loving to try other jokes on you.”

“Then a good friend of theirs would advise them not to do so,” replied Mr. Cantwell, with a snap of his jaws.

That closed the matter for the time being.  The first recitation period of the morning had been lost, but now the students, most of them finding difficulty in suppressing their chuckles, were sent to the various class rooms.

Before recess came, the principal having a period free from class work, silently escaped from the building, carrying the thirty-six hundred pennies to the bank.  As that number of pennies weighs something more than twenty-three pounds, the load was not a light one.

“I have a big lot of pennies here that I want to deposit,” he explained to the receiving teller.

“How many?” asked the teller.

“Thirty-six hundred,” replied Mr. Cantwell.

“Are they counted and done up into rolls of fifty, with your name on each roll?” asked the teller.

“Why—–­er—–­no,” stammered the principal.  “They’re just loose—–­in bulk, I mean.”

“Then I’m very sorry, Mr. Cantwell, but we can’t receive them in that shape, sir.  They will have to be counted and wrapped, and your name written on each roll.”

“Do you mean to say that I must take these pennies home, count them all—–­again!—–­and then wrap them and sign the wrappers.”

“I’m sorry, but you, or some one will have to do it, Mr. Cantwell.”

Then and there the principal exploded.  One man there was in the bank at that moment who was obliged to turn his head away and stifle back the laughter.  That man was Mr. Pollock, of “The Blade.”  Pollock knew now what Dick & Co. had wanted of such a cargo of pennies.