ing rusty for want of
exercise. The door of the Lower Third had not had a panel kicked out of
it for a whole week, and Dr Allsuch's pictures and sofas and piano were
all stacked up in the Detention Room while their proper quarters
underwent a "doing-up."

There was no mistake about the school having broken up. And yet, if it
was so, how came we all to be there this Christmas week, instead of
sitting at our own firesides in the bosoms of our own families, anywhere
but at Ferriby?

When I say all, I mean all in Jolliffe's House; the others had cleared
out. Bull's was empty, and Wragg's, across the quadrangle, had not a
ghost of a fellow left. Nor had the doctor's. Every other house was
shut up, but Jolliffe's was as full up as the night before a county
match, and no sign of an exodus.

Of course the reader guesses the reason at once!

"I know," says one virtuous youth; "they'd all been detained for bad
conduct, and stopped their holidays!"

Wrong, my exemplary one! Jolliffe's was the best behaved house in
Ferriby, though I say so who should not. But any one could tell you so.
For every thousand lines of imposition the other houses had to turn out
Jolliffe's only had a hundred, and for every half-dozen canes worn out
on the horny palms of Bull's and Wragg's, one was quite enough for us.

No; the fact was, one of our fellows had had scarlet fever a fortnight
before the holidays, and as he was in and out with us for some days
before it was discovered, sleeping in our dormitory, and sitting next to
us in class it was a settled thing we were all in for it.

So the school was suddenly broken up, the other houses all packed off,
the sickly ones among us--there were only one or two--removed to the
infirmary, and the rest of us, under the charge of Jolliffe himself,
invited to make the best of a bad job, and enjoy ourselves as well as we
could, with the promise that if in three weeks no one else showed signs
of knocking up, we should be allowed to go home.

Of course, we were awfully sold at first, and by no means in an amiable
frame of mind. It is no joke to be done out of Christmas at home. What
a dolt that Gilks was to get scarlet fever! Why could he not have
waited till he got home?

But after a day or two we shook down, as British boys will, to our lot.
After all, it was only a case of putting off our holiday, and meanwhile
we were allowed to do anything we liked, short of setting the place on
fire, or ki