e Banquo, his costume being completed by a girdle round his
nightshirt, consisting of a very fine crimson silk handkerchief, richly
broidered with gold, which had been brought to him from India, and which
at first, in the innocence of his heart, he used to wear on Sundays,
until he acquired the sobriquet of "the Dragon." Duncan made a
superb Macbeth.

They were doing the dagger-scene, which was put on the stage in a most
novel manner. A sheet had been pinned from the top of the room, on one
side of which stood a boy with a broken dinner knife, the handle end of
which he was pushing through a hole in the middle of the sheet at the
shadow of Duncan on the other side.

Duncan himself, in an attitude of intensely affected melodrama, was
spouting--

"Is this a dagger which I see before me?
The handle towards me now? come, let me clutch thee;"

And he snatched convulsively at the handle of the protruded knife; but
as soon as he nearly touched it, this end was immediately withdrawn, and
the blade end substituted, which made the comic Macbeth instantly draw
back again, and recommence his apostrophe. This scene had tickled the
audience immensely, and Duncan, amid shouts of laughter, was just
drawing the somewhat unwarrantable conclusion that it was

"A dagger of the mind, a false creation,"

when a sudden grating, followed by a reverbrated clang, produced a dead
silence.

"Cave," shouted Eric, and took a flying leap into his bed. Instantly
there was a bolt in different directions; the sheet was torn down, the
candles dashed out, the beds shoved aside, and the dormitories at once
plunged in profound silence, only broken by the heavy breathing of
sleepers, when in strode--not Mr. Rose or any of the under
masters--but--Dr. Rowlands himself!

He stood for a moment to survey the scene. All the dormitory doors were
wide open; the sheet which had formed the stage curtain lay torn on the
floor of No. 7; the beds in all the adjoining rooms were in the
strangest positions; and half-extinguished wicks still smouldered in
several of the sconces. Every boy was in bed, but the extraordinary way
in which the bed clothes were huddled about told an unmistakeable tale.

He glanced quickly round, but the moment he had passed into No. 8, he
heard a run, and, turning, just caught sight of Upton's figure vanishing
into the darkness of the lavatory, towards the study stairs.

He said not a word, but stalked hastily through a