my table-cloth every morning?’ roared I.  ‘Yes,’ says he.  ‘Did you do it this morning?’ ‘Yes.’  ’You young liar!  I put these pieces of paper on the table last night, and if you’d taken the table-cloth off you’d have seen them, so I’m going to give you a good licking.’  Then my youngster takes one hand out of his pocket, and just stoops down and picks up two of the bits of paper, and holds them out to me.  There was written on each, in great round text, ‘Harry East, his mark.’  The young rogue had found my trap out, taken away my paper, and put some of his there, every bit ear-marked.  I’d a great mind to lick him for his impudence; but, after all, one has no right to be laying traps, so I didn’t.  Of course I was at his mercy till the end of the half, and in his weeks my study was so frowzy I couldn’t sit in it.”

“They spoil one’s things so, too,” chimed in a third boy.  “Hall and Brown were night-fags last week.  I called ‘fag,’ and gave them my candlesticks to clean.  Away they went, and didn’t appear again.  When they’d had time enough to clean them three times over, I went out to look after them.  They weren’t in the passages so down I went into the hall, where I heard music; and there I found them sitting on the table, listening to Johnson, who was playing the flute, and my candlesticks stuck between the bars well into the fire, red-hot, clean spoiled.  They’ve never stood straight since, and I must get some more.  However, I gave them a good licking; that’s one comfort.”

Such were the sort of scrapes they were always getting into; and so, partly by their own faults, partly from circumstances, partly from the faults of others, they found themselves outlaws, ticket-of-leave men, or what you will in that line—­in short, dangerous parties—­and lived the sort of hand-to-mouth, wild, reckless life which such parties generally have to put up with.  Nevertheless they never quite lost favour with young Brooke, who was now the cock of the house, and just getting into the sixth; and Diggs stuck to them like a man, and gave them store of good advice, by which they never in the least profited.

And even after the house mended, and law and order had been restored, which soon happened after young Brooke and Diggs got into the sixth, they couldn’t easily or at once return into the paths of steadiness, and many of the old, wild, out-of-bounds habits stuck to them as firmly as ever.  While they had been quite little boys, the scrapes they got into in the School hadn’t much mattered to any one; but now they were in the upper school, all wrong-doers from which were sent up straight to the Doctor at once.  So they began to come under his notice; and as they were a sort of leaders in a small way amongst their own contemporaries, his eye, which was everywhere, was upon them.

It was a toss-up whether they turned out well or ill, and so they were just the boys who caused most anxiety to such a master.  You have been told of the first occasion on which they were sent up to the Doctor, and the remembrance of it was so pleasant that they had much less fear of him than most boys of their standing had.  “It’s all his look,” Tom used to say to East, “that frightens fellows.  Don’t you remember, he never said anything to us my first half-year for being an hour late for locking-up?”