are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which
emerge haphazard the figures of boys--boys working, boys eating,
boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking
questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs
and along passages, the whole picture faintly scented with a
composite aroma consisting of roast beef, ink, chalk, and that
curious classroom smell which is like nothing else on earth.

I cannot arrange the incidents. I can see Mr Abney, furrowed as to
the brow and drooping at the jaw, trying to separate Ogden Ford
from a half-smoked cigar-stump. I can hear Glossop, feverishly
angry, bellowing at an amused class. A dozen other pictures come
back to me, but I cannot place them in their order; and perhaps,
after all, their sequence is unimportant. This story deals with
affairs which were outside the ordinary school life.

With the war between the Little Nugget and Authority, for
instance, the narrative has little to do. It is a subject for an
epic, but it lies apart from the main channel of the story, and
must be avoided. To tell of his gradual taming, of the chaos his
advent caused until we became able to cope with him, would be to
turn this story into a treatise on education. It is enough to say
that the process of moulding his character and exorcising the
devil which seemed to possess him was slow.

It was Ogden who introduced tobacco-chewing into the school, with
fearful effects one Saturday night on the aristocratic interiors
of Lords Gartridge and Windhall and Honourables Edwin Bellamy and
Hildebrand Kyne. It was the ingenious gambling-game imported by
Ogden which was rapidly undermining the moral sense of twenty-four