ice in the case of all ordinary
offences for the masters of the lower forms to deal out their own
retribution, but special cases were always reserved for a higher court--
the head master's study. Hither the culprits were conducted in awful
state and impeached; here they heard judgment pronounced, and felt
sentence executed. It was an awful tribunal, that head master's study!
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here," was the motto--if not written, at
least clearly implied--over the door. The mere mention of the place was
enough to make one's flesh creep. Yet, somehow or other, Sam Scamp, was
always finding himself there. He must have abandoned hope once a week
at least during his school life, and before he left school I am certain
he must have worn that awful carpet threadbare, for all _his_ offences
were special offences. When half a dozen boys had spent one afternoon
in throwing stones over a certain wall, the stone which broke the
doctor's conservatory window was, as might be expected, Sam's. On the
occasion of the memorable battle of the dormitories--that famous fight
in which fifteen boys of Ward's dormitory, arrayed in their nightgowns
and armed with bolsters, engaged at dead of night in mortal combat with
twenty boys of Johnson's dormitory for the possession of a certain new
boy who had arrived that day with a trunk full of cakes--when the
monitors appeared on the scene, one boy, and one only, was captured, and
that was Sam. When a dozen fellows had been copying off one another,
the exercise book from which the discovery was made would be sure to be
Sam's; and when, in the temporary absence of the master, the schoolroom
became transformed into a bear-garden--as it sometimes will--if suddenly
the door were to open the figure which would inevitably fall on the
master's eye would be that of Sam, dancing a hornpipe in the middle of
the floor, shouting at the top of his voice, and covered from head to
foot with the dust he had himself kicked up.

On such occasions he was led off to the doctor's study. I happened to
be there once when he was brought up, and so had an opportunity of
witnessing a scene which, if new to me, must have been very familiar to
my unfortunate schoolfellow. (By the way, the reason _I_ was in the
doctor's study was merely to return a book he had lent me, mind that,
reader!)

"What, here again, Samuel?" said the doctor, recognising his too-well-
known visitor.

"I'm very sorry, sir," says