om the keyhole; if you get up a
party to partake of a smuggled supper in the dormitory, he will conduct
a master to the scene, and get you into a row. There's no secret so
deadly he won't get hold of; nothing you want kept quiet that he won't
spread all round the school. In fact, there's scarcely anything he does
not put his finger into, and everything he puts his finger into he
spoils.

If, in a weak moment of benevolence, you take him back into your
confidence and friendship, no one will be more humble and forgiving and
affable; but he will just use your new favour as a weapon for paying
back old grudges, and sorely will you repent your folly.

In fact, there is only one place for Jerry--that place is Coventry.
That city is famous for one sneak already. Let Jerry keep him company.
There he can tell tales, and peep and listen and wriggle to his heart's
content. He'll please himself, and do no one any harm.

A sneak has not always the plea of self-interest for his meanness.
Often enough his tale-bearing or his mischief-making can not only do his
victims incalculable harm, but cannot do him any possible good.

What good did the snake in the fable expect who, having been rescued,
and warmed and restored to life by the merciful woodcutter, turned on
his deliverer and stung him? No wonder the good fellow knocked him on
the head! I knew another sneak once who seemed to make a regular
profession of this amiable propensity. He seemed to consider his path
in life was to detect and inform on whatever, to his small mind, seemed
a culpable offence. In the middle of school, all of a sudden his raspy
voice would lift itself up in ejaculations like these, addressed to the
master,--

"Please, sir," (he always prefaced his remarks with "Please, sir"),
"Please, sir, Tom Cobb's eating an apple!"

"Please, sir, Jenkins has made a blot!"

"Please, sir, Allen junior is cutting his name on the desk!"

Perhaps the indignant Allen junior would here take occasion to
acknowledge his sense of this attention by a private kick under the
desk. Then it would be--

"All right, Joe Allen; _I'll sneak of you_, you see if I don't!"

No one could do it better.

Amiable little pet, how we all loved him!

Sneaking seems to be a sort of disease with some people. There's no
other way of accounting for it. It sometimes seems as if the mere sight
of happiness or success in others is the signal for its breaking out.
As we have said, its