d he did not imagine that
castigation at the hands of the doctor would be particularly severe.
For the head-master's class-room contained a cupboard, rarely opened,
and in that cupboard there were rods, never used at Weston for
educational purposes. For if a boy did not prepare his lessons properly
it was assumed that they were too difficult for him, and he was sent
down into a lower form. If he still failed to meet the school
requirements, his parents were requested to remove him, and he left,
without a stain on his character, as the magistrates say, but he was
written down an ass. Such a termination to the Weston career was
dreaded infinitely more than any amount of corporal punishment or
impositions, and the prospect of being degraded from his class caused
the idlest boy to set to work, so that such disgraces were not common.
The birch, then, was had recourse to simply for the maintenance of
discipline, all forms of imprisonment being considered injurious to the
health. And an invitation to the doctor's class-room after school meant
a short period, quite long enough, however, of acute physical sensation,
which was not of a pleasurable character.

But everything is comparative in this world, and Tom Buller, who had
feared that expulsion might be the penalty exacted for his offence, or
at any rate that his friends at home would be written to, and a great
fuss made, was quite in high spirits at the thought of getting the
business over so quickly and easily. He found a group of friends
waiting for him to come out of the doctor's study, curious to know what
he had been wanted for, Tom not being the sort of fellow, they thought,
to get into a serious scrape; and when he told them that he had got out
of his window the night before to go skating, that Mr Rabbits had
caught him as he was getting in again by lighting up some chemical dodge
which illuminated the whole place, and that he was to be flogged after
eleven-o'clock school, they were filled with admiration and
astonishment. What a brilliant idea! What courage and coolness in the
execution! What awfully bad luck that old Rabbits had come by just at
the wrong moment! They took his impending punishment even more
cheerfully than he did himself, as our friends generally do, and
promised to go in a body and see the operation. One, indeed, Simmonds,
lamented over his sad fate, and sang by way of a dirge--

"`Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling,
The darling