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convulsively at the handle of the protruded knife; but as soon as he nearly touched it, this end was immediately withdrawn, and the blade end substituted, which made the comic Macbeth instantly draw back again, and recommence his apostrophe.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.