in, and presented each inmate of the room with six cuts with a
swagger-stick. This summary and Captain Kettle-like move had its
effect. There was no more hooting. The fags bethought themselves of
other ways of showing their disapproval of their new head.

One genius suggested that they might kill two birds with one
stone--snub Kennedy and pay a stately compliment to Fenn by applying
to the latter for leave to go out of bounds instead of to the former.
As the giving of leave "down town" was the prerogative of the head of
the house, and of no other, there was a suggestiveness about this mode
of procedure which appealed to the junior dayroom.

But the star of the junior dayroom was not in the ascendant. Fenn
might have quarrelled with Kennedy, and be extremely indignant at his
removal from the headship of the house, but he was not the man to
forget to play the game. His policy of non-interference did not
include underhand attempts to sap Kennedy's authority. When Gorrick,
of the Lower Fourth, the first of the fags to put the ingenious scheme
into practice, came to him, still smarting from Kennedy's castigation,
Fenn promptly gave him six more cuts, worse than the first, and kicked
him out into the passage. Gorrick naturally did not want to spoil a
good thing by giving Fenn's game away, so he lay low and said nothing,
with the result that Wren and three others met with the same fate,
only more so, because Fenn's wrath increased with each visit.

Kennedy, of course, heard nothing of this, or he might perhaps have
thought better of Fenn. As for the junior dayroom, it was obliged to
work off its emotion by jeering Jimmy Silver from the safety of the
touchline when the head of Blackburn's was refereeing in a match
between the juniors of his house and those of Kay's. Blackburn's