to discover a loose board, and the floor space caused by its
removal served as a cupboard, a cupboard so damp and unhealthy that the
most lenient sanitary inspector must infallibly have condemned it. Here,
just before afternoon school, they secreted ginger beer bottles, a loaf
of bread, butter, some tomatoes and a chunk of Gorgonzola cheese. In the
morning they carried away the bottles in their pockets. It would have
been much easier and much more comfortable to have had a meal in their
study, but then it would have lacked the savour of romance. The rule
forbidding the importation of food into the dormitories was very strict.
At the end of the term, when both were going to leave that particular
room, they nailed down the board, so that no other marauder should
imitate them. They wished to be unique. But before they did so, they put
in the mouldy cupboard a lemonade bottle and one of the blue Fernhurst
roll-books for the Michaelmas Term, 1913. They underlined their names in
it, and left it as a memento of a few happy evenings.

"I wonder," said Caruthers, "if years hence someone will pull up that
board and find the book, and seeing our names will wonder who we were."

"Perhaps," said Davenport. "And, you know, they may try and find out
something about us in back numbers of _The Fernhurstian_, or in the
photographs of house sides. Do you think they will be able to find out
anything about us?"

"I hope so; but how little we know even of the bloods of 1905, and as
likely as not we sha'n't ever be bloods. It will be rather funny if some
day of all the things we have done nothing remains but the blue
roll-book."

"Funny?" said Davenport. "Rather pathetic, I should say."

At fifteen one is apt to be sentimental.

Perhaps some rude fingers have already torn up that board; perhaps even
now some new generation of Fernhurstians is using it as a receptacle for
tobacco, or cheese, or any other commodity contraband to the
dormitories. But perhaps underneath a board in No. 1 double dormitory
there still repose that identical lemonade bottle and the roll-book with
its blue cover, now sadly faded and its leaves turned up with age, to
serve as Gordon's epitaph, when all his other deeds have perished in
oblivion.

* * * * *

There is perhaps nothing that has made so many friendships as a big row,
or the prospect of one. We always feel in sympathy with people whose
aims are identical with our own, an