there was no access to this room from the principal
staircase of the house. You had to pass through the room below and go
up a little separate staircase to reach to the floor above. The lower
room was also a bedroom for the boys, and Uncle John's little scheme
was this:

He made a hole with a gimlet in the frame of one of the windows of his
bedroom, passed a piece of string through the hole, and carried it
outside the wall of the house down to a similar hole in a window-frame
of the room below. To the end of the string in the upper room was
fastened a small rattle, while the other end of the string--that in
the room below--was taken into the bed of a boy who slept near the
window.

This admirable little invention once in order, there was more rioting
in the upper room than ever; and the master, disturbed by the noise,
soon went, cane in hand, to stop it. The instant he set foot in the
lower room the boy there who held the string in bed gave it a little
pull: the rattle sounded--ting! ting!--in the room above, and in an
instant every boy was in bed and snoring. Perhaps they had been
playing at leap-frog the moment before, but as Dr. Birchall entered
the room--and he crept up the staircase very quietly, that he might
catch them unawares--he found some twenty boys lying in bed, seemingly
sound asleep, though snoring unnaturally loud.

The doctor was so disconcerted by this unexpected state of things that
he retired at once, fancying perhaps that his ears had deceived him
when he thought he had heard a noise in the room. The same thing
happened two or three times; the doctor was puzzled, and the
invention appeared a complete success; but at last all was
discovered.

[Illustration: THE ACADEMY BAND.]

The boys one evening began imprudently to play at "tossing in the
blanket" before they were undressed. The rattle sounded, and they had
just time to hide away the blanket. But the doctor coming in, and
finding they were only then beginning to undress, knew they must have
been at some mischief, and began questioning one after another.
Unluckily, while he was in the room the rattle sounded again by
accident; perhaps the boy in the room below had pulled the string by
moving in bed. The doctor looked about, found the rattle hanging just
below the window, saw the string, opened the window and traced its
course outside, went down into the room below, and understood the
whole arrangement. Then he put the rattle in his pocket a