uite little boys, the scrapes they got into
in the School hadn't much mattered to anyone; but now they were in the
upper school, all wrong-doers from which were sent up straight to the
Doctor at once: so they began to come under his notice; and as they were
a sort of leaders in a small way amongst their own contemporaries, his
eye, which was everywhere, was upon them.

It was a toss-up whether they turned out well or ill, and so they were
just the boys who caused most anxiety to such a master. You have been
told of the first occasion on which they were sent up to the Doctor, and
the remembrance of it was so pleasant that they had much less fear of
him than most boys of their standing had. "It's all his look," Tom used
to say to East, "that frightens fellows: don't you remember, he never
said anything to us my first half-year, for being an hour late for
locking up?"

The next time that Tom came before him, however, the interview was of a
very different kind. It happened just about the time at which we have
now arrived, and was the first of a series of scrapes into which our
hero managed now to tumble.

The river Avon at Rugby is a slow and not very clear stream, in which
chub, dace, roach, and other coarse fish are (or were) plentiful enough,
together with a fair sprinkling of small jack, but no fish worth
sixpence either for sport or food. It is, however, a capital river for
bathing, as it has many nice small pools and several good reaches for
swimming, all within about a mile of one another, and at an easy twenty
minutes' walk from the school. This mile of water is rented, or used to
be rented, for bathing purposes, by the Trustees of the School, for the
boys. The footpath to Brownsover crosses the river by "the Planks," a
curious old single-plank bridge, running for fifty or sixty yards into
the flat meadows on each side of the river,--for in the winter there are
frequent floods. Above the Planks were the bathing places for the
smaller boys; Sleath's, the first bathing place where all new boys had
to begin, until they had proved to the bathing men (three steady
individuals who were paid to attend daily through the summer to prevent
accidents) that they could swim pretty decently, when they were allowed
to go on to Anstey's, about one hundred and fifty yards below. Here
there was a hole about six feet deep and twelve feet across, over which
the puffing urchins struggled to the opposite side, and thought no small
bee