d-up in the desk may have suggested the idea enunciated by the
Scotch poet who said:

The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Gang aft a-gley.

So do those of boys; for something happened ere many weeks had elapsed,
and before Glyn Severn had found a suitable opportunity for
administering the punishment that he thought it was his bounden duty to
inflict.

In fact, the thoughts of Dr Bewley's pupils were greatly exercised
about the trouble that hung like a cloud over the school; and in its
dissipation Glyn Severn and Singh had a good deal to do, while, oddly
enough, Wrench's cat played his part.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

MR. MORRIS PREPARES.

Examination-Day was rather a frequent periodical affair at Dr Bewley's.
One month Monsieur Brohanne would have all the fun, as Glyn called it,
an afternoon being devoted by the boys to the answering of questions,
set by the French master, neatly printed upon a sheet of foolscap paper
at the local printing-office, and carefully arranged upon a rough pad
consisting of so many sheets of perfectly new blotting-paper upon each
pupil's desk.

At another time it would be the Doctor's day, and his examination-papers
would be distributed. By the same rule, in due time in the periodicity,
Mr Rampson would revel in Latin puzzles; and Mr Morris would request
the young gentlemen to build up curious constructions with
perpendiculars, "slanting-diculars," and other varieties of the
diagonal, in company with polygons and other forms of bodies with their
many angles and curves, as set forth originally by a certain antique
brain-puzzler of the name of Euclid, for the first part of the
examination, the second portion consisting of that peculiar form of
sport in which, instead of ordinary figures, the various letters of the
alphabet were shuffled up and used for calculations, plused, minused,
squared, and cubed up to any number of degrees, under the name of
equations.

It was one afternoon prior to Morris's day, which was to begin at ten
o'clock the next morning, and when the young gentlemen were all out in
the play-field fallowing their brains for the next day's work, so that
they might begin rested and refreshed, this being the Doctor's
invariable plan, that Mr Morris was the only person in the
establishment who was busy. He had received the foolscap sheets from
the printer, carried them to his desk, upon which lay quite a pile of
new thick white blotting-paper, and taking his seat,