sat quite alone,
chuckling with delight as he skimmed over his series of mathematical
questions, one and all extracted from those which had been used at
Cambridge.

"Ha, ha!" he chuckled. "This will puzzle some of them! This will make
some of them screw up their foreheads! The stiffest paper I ever set.
Eh? What's that?"

He started up, looking round, for there had been a sound like a soft
thump; but he could see nothing on account of intervening desks. But,
all the same, Wrench's tom-cat had leaped gently down to the floor, and
from there he bounded on to one of the lines of desks, along which he
stole very carefully, pausing to sniff at each keyhole as he leaned
over, fully aware as he was that several of these desks were used as
menageries, in addition to a very favourite one where he had paused more
than once on account of the delicious black-beetly odour stealing up
through the cracks, and which denoted white mice.

In one desk silkworms began as eggs upon a sheet of paper, ate, and grew
themselves into fine, fat, transparent straw-coloured larvae which
afterwards spun cocoons. In another there were a couple of beautiful
little green lizards; while one boy had his desk divided into two
portions by means of a piece of board cut to a cardboard-plan by the
Plymborough carpenter at a price. In one portion of the desk there were
books and sundry tops and balls; the other was the home of a baby
hedgehog, which lived upon bread and milk, and had a bad habit of
sitting in its saucer.

In the next row of desks there was rather an odorous creature which
puzzled Tom a good deal; so much so that when the theatre was empty he
made that desk a special spot for study in a very uncomfortable
position, crouching as he did upon the slope with his head hanging over
the edge and his nose close to the keyhole.

That desk required much thought, for he was convinced by gliding sounds
that there was a live occupant therein, and his impression was that it
was good to eat; but he had never seen inside, and was not aware that it
contained an ordinary grass-snake.

Tom was convinced too, though he had never seen it, and was not aware of
the differences in tails, that the inhabitant of another desk--
enlightened as he was by sundry scratchings and gnawings--was a rat,
though it was only Fatty Brown's young squirrel, which was destroying
the imprisoning wood in a way that was alarming to the owner of the
desk.

There were seve