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 ha