CHAPTER XIX.
O ruthful scene! when from a nook obscure, His little sister doth his peril see, All playful as she sate, she grows demure, She finds full soon her wonted spirits flee, She meditates a prayer to set him free.
SHENSTONE.
The setting sun shone into the great west window of the school at Stoneborough, on its bare walls, the masters' desks, the forms polished with use, and the square, inky, hacked and hewed chests, carved with the names of many generations of boys.
About six or eight little boys were clearing away the books or papers that they, or those who owned them as fags, had left astray, and a good deal of talk and laughing was going on among them.

"Ha!" exclaimed one, "here has Harrison left his book behind him that he was showing us the gladiators in!" and, standing by the third master's desk, he turned over a page or two of Smith's 'Antiquities', exclaiming, "It is full of pictures--here's an old man blowing the bellows--" "Let me see!" cried Tom May, precipitating himself across the benches and over the desk, with so little caution, that there was an outcry; and, to his horror, he beheld the ink spilled over Mr.Harrison's book, while, "There, August! you've been and done it!" "You'll catch it!" resounded on all sides.
"What good will staring with your mouth open do!" exclaimed Edward Anderson, the eldest present.

"Here! a bit of blotting-paper this moment!" Tom, dreadfully frightened, handed a sheet torn from an old paper-case that he had inherited from Harry, saying despairingly, "It won't take it out, will it ?" "No, little stupid head, but don't you see, I'm stopping it from running down the edges, or soaking in.

He won't be the wiser till he opens it again at that place." "When he does, he will," said the bewildered Tom.
"Let him.

It won't tell tales." "He's coming!" cried another boy, "he is close at the door." Anderson hastily shut the book over the blotting-paper, which he did not venture to retain in his hand, dragged Tom down from the desk, and was apparently entirely occupied with arranging his own box, when Mr.
Harrison came in.