The Scapegrace
by
The fellow’s always in a row! No matter what it’s about; no matter whose fault it is; no matter how he tried to keep out of it; it’s always the same–he’s in a row.
To fancy him not in a row would involve a flight of imagination of which we, at any rate, are utterly incapable. He has lived in an atmosphere of rows–rows in the nursery, rows at the dinner table, rows in the schoolroom, rows in the playground. His hands are like leather, so often have they been caned; his ears are past all feeling, so often have they been boxed; and solitary confinement, impositions, the corner, and the head master’s study, have all lost their horrors for him, so often has he had to endure them.
Sam Scamp of our school was, without exception, the unluckiest fellow I ever came across. It was the practice in the case of all ordinary offences for the masters of the lower forms to deal out their own retribution, but special cases were always reserved for a higher court– the head master’s study. Hither the culprits were conducted in awful state and impeached; here they heard judgment pronounced, and felt sentence executed. It was an awful tribunal, that head master’s study! “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” was the motto–if not written, at least clearly implied–over the door. The mere mention of the place was enough to make one’s flesh creep. Yet, somehow or other, Sam Scamp, was always finding himself there. He must have abandoned hope once a week at least during his school life, and before he left school I am certain he must have worn that awful carpet threadbare, for all his offences were special offences. When half a dozen boys had spent one afternoon in throwing stones over a certain wall, the stone which broke the doctor’s conservatory window was, as might be expected, Sam’s. On the occasion of the memorable battle of the dormitories–that famous fight in which fifteen boys of Ward’s dormitory, arrayed in their nightgowns and armed with bolsters, engaged at dead of night in mortal combat with twenty boys of Johnson’s dormitory for the possession of a certain new boy who had arrived that day with a trunk full of cakes–when the monitors appeared on the scene, one boy, and one only, was captured, and that was Sam. When a dozen fellows had been copying off one another, the exercise book from which the discovery was made would be sure to be Sam’s; and when, in the temporary absence of the master, the schoolroom became transformed into a bear-garden–as it sometimes will–if suddenly the door were to open the figure which would inevitably fall on the master’s eye would be that of Sam, dancing a hornpipe in the middle of the floor, shouting at the top of his voice, and covered from head to foot with the dust he had himself kicked up.
On such occasions he was led off to the doctor’s study. I happened to be there once when he was brought up, and so had an opportunity of witnessing a scene which, if new to me, must have been very familiar to my unfortunate schoolfellow. (By the way, the reason I was in the doctor’s study was merely to return a book he had lent me, mind that, reader!)
“What, here again, Samuel?” said the doctor, recognising his too-well- known visitor.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” says Sam, humbly. “I can’t make out how it is. I try all I know–I do indeed–but somehow I’m always in trouble.”
“You are,” replies the doctor. “What is it about this time, Mr Wardlaw?”
“I can tell you, sir–” begins Sam eagerly.
“Be silent, sir! Well, Mr Wardlaw?”
“The boy has been very disrespectful, sir. When I came into the class- room this morning and opened my desk, I found it contained a guinea-pig and two white mice, who had–“