CHAPTER TWELVE.

THE UNTIDY BOY.

Look at him! You could tell he was an untidy fellow at a single glance.

One of his bootlaces is hanging loose, and the band of his scarf has slipped up above his collar. Though it is a fine day, his trouser legs are splashed up to the knee; and as for a parting to his hair, you might as well expect an Indian jungle to be combed. His hands are all over ink, and the sticky marks about his mouth tell their own tale. In short, Jack Sloven is a dirty boy, and is anything but a credit to the school he belongs to.

I wish you could see his school books. The pages look like well-used drum parchments, and I am certain Jack must often find it hard to decipher the words upon them. His exercises look as if they had been left out in an ink shower, and the very pen he uses is generally wet with ink up to the very tip of the handle, which, by the way, he usually nibbles when he's nothing better to do. Who shall describe his desk?

It is generally understood that a schoolboy's desk is the receptacle for a moderately miscellaneous a.s.sortment of articles, but Jack's seemed like a great pie, into which everything under the sun was crammed and stored up. The lid never shut; but if you were to open it, its contents would astonish you as much as the contents of that wonderful pie in the nursery rhyme astonished the king when he lifted the crust.

There were books, papers, hooks, b.a.l.l.s, worms, stale sandwiches, photographs, toffee, birds' eggs, keys, money, knives, cherry stones, silkworms, marbles, pencils, handkerchiefs, tarts, gum, sleeve links, and walnut sh.e.l.ls. Any one venturesome enough to take a header through these might succeed in reaching the layer of last year's apple peel below, or in penetrating to the crumb heaps in the bottom corners; but few there were who possessed that amount of boldness. Of course, Jack had no notion of what his worldly goods consisted. He had a way of shying things into his desk and forgetting them; and only when it became so full that the lid stood nearly wide open did he apprehend the necessity of a "clear-out."

But if there was ever anything more awful to behold than Jack's desk, it was one of these "clear-outs." The event generally got wind when it was about to happen, and never failed to create a sensation in the school.

All who had a right took care to be present at the ceremony, and I do believe if Jack had had the sense to issue reserved seat tickets, he might have made a nice thing out of it. At any rate, he made a nice thing out of that desk.

Quite indifferent to our presence and laughter, he began leisurely to take out its contents and spread them in glorious array upon the floor, with a view (as he was kind enough to explain to some one who asked him) "to sort them up." The books and papers went in a pile by themselves; all loose papers were thrust inside the covers of the books; and all books without covers were jammed into all the covers without books that seemed likely to fit. Then all the pens and pencils were put into a pencil case, and if any happened to be too long, they were broken to the required shortness. This being satisfactorily done, Jack used next to turn his attention to the miscellaneous articles of food of which he found himself possessed. The sandwiches, if not more than a week old, he either ate or generously offered to some of us; the toffee he put into his pocket, and the tarts (if the jam were not already dried up) he put aside for private consumption hereafter. The sh.e.l.ls, stones, peel, etcetera, he heaped up in one place on the floor, and trusted to Providence to dispose of them. The fish-hooks and baits, the birds'

eggs that were not broken, the silkworms, the photographs, pencils, knives, and other articles of use or ornament, he sorted carefully, and then put back into the desk. By this time it would occur to him he had been long enough over this business, so he shovelled the books and papers in anyhow, and anything else which happened still to be left out, and then finding that the lid would shut within an inch, he sighed with the relief of a man who has well discharged a painful duty.

How was it to be expected Jack could ever find anything he wanted?

Sometimes he would sit grubbing in his desk, or among his books, to find a certain exercise or paper for half an hour, and finally, when everything was upside down, he would remember he had it in his waistcoat pocket, from the recesses of which he produced it crumpled, greasy, and almost illegible. On Sundays he always had a hunt for his gloves; and at the end of the term, when he undertook his own packing, he generally first of all contrived to pack up his keys in the very bottom of the trunk, and so had to take everything out before he could get them, and then when (with the aid of some dozen of us sitting on the top of the unfortunate receptacle, to cram down the jumble of things inside to a shutting point) he had succeeded in triumphantly turning the lock, it was a wonder if he had not to open and unpack it all again to find his straps.

As to his dress, I can safely say that, though Jack always had good clothes, he always looked much less respectable than other boys whose parents could not afford them anything but common material. Not only did he lose b.u.t.tons, and drop grease over his coat and trousers, but he never folded or brushed them, or had them mended in time, as a tidy boy would have done. We were quite ashamed to be seen walking with him sometimes, he looked so disreputable, but no reproofs or persuasions could induce him to take more pains about his appearance.

"A place for everything, and everything in its place," was a lesson Jack could not learn; the result was constant and incalculable trouble. If people could only realise the amount of time lost by untidiness, I think they would regard the fault with positive horror. Why, Jack Sloven, at the very mildest computation, must have lost half an hour a day. Half an hour a day, at the end of the year, makes a clear working fortnight to the bad, so that in twenty-five years, if he goes on as he has begun, he will have one year of which it will take him all his time to give an account.

But not only does untidiness waste time, and render the person who falls into it a disreputable member of society, but it seriously endangers his success in life. Jack Sloven was naturally a clever fellow. When he could find his books, he made good use of them; none of us could come up to him in translations, and he had the knack of always understanding what he read. If it had not been for this wretched habit, he might have got prizes at school, and still higher honours in after life; but as it was, he always came to grief. The notes he had made on his work were never to be found; he spent more time in collecting his materials than he had to spare for using them; most of his work had to be scrambled through at the last moment, and was accordingly imperfect. If Jack goes to business, he has a very poor chance of getting on, for untidiness and business will no more go together than oil and water. Few things are more against a man in business than untidiness; people fight shy of him.

If his dress is untidy, his letters slovenly, his habits unpunctual, and his accounts confused, he will be regarded as a man not reliable, and not to be trusted, and people will refuse to transact with him. If he has a house of his own, he will never succeed in keeping his servants long, for they--so they say--have quite enough to do without unnecessary work. In fact, I don't see how Jack is to get on at all unless he mends his ways.

Is it possible for an untidy boy to become tidy? Try. And if at first you don't succeed--try again. You are sure to succeed if you stick to it. Don't aim at apple-pie order--everything in lavender--never to be touched, and all that sort of thing. That's as bad as the boy who once possessed a desk, which he would never use, for fear of marking the blotting-paper, and breaking the paper bands round the envelopes.

No; if you can get into the way of always putting the book you read back into its place on the shelf, and the paper you want where you will be certain to find it again--if you encourage a jealousy of rubbish, and a horror of dirt--if you take to heart the proverb I quoted just now, "A place for everything, and everything in its place"--you will be as tidy as you ever need be; and Jack Sloven's troubles and misfortunes will never be yours.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

THE SCAPEGRACE.

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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 cla.s.s- room this morning and opened my desk, I found it contained a guinea-pig and two white mice, who had--"

Here the unlucky Sam, after a desperate effort, in the course of which he has almost choked himself with a handkerchief, bursts into a laugh.

"What do you mean, sir?" thunders the doctor.

"Oh, sir, I couldn't help it--really I couldn't; I would rather have choked than do it--it's just like me!"

And he looks so distressed and humble that the doctor turns from him, and invites Mr Wardlaw to resume his impeachment.

"I have only to say that this boy, on being charged with the deed, confessed to having done it."

"Oh yes, sir, that's all right--I did it; I'm very sorry; somehow I can't make out how it is I'm so bad," says Sam, with the air of one suffering from the strain of a constant anxiety.

"Don't talk nonsense, sir!" says the doctor, sternly; "you can make it out as well as I can."

"Shall I hold out my hand, sir?" says Sam, who by this time has a good idea of the routine of practice pursued in such interviews.

"No," says the doctor. "Leave him here, Mr Wardlaw; and you," adds he, for the first time remembering that I was present--"you can go."

So we departed, leaving Sam shivering and shaking in the middle of the carpet. It was half an hour before he rejoined his schoolfellows, and this time his hands were not sore. But somehow he managed to avoid getting into sc.r.a.pes for a good deal longer than usual. But there is no resisting the inevitable. He did in due time find himself in another row; and then he suddenly vanished from our midst, for he had been expelled.

Now, with regard to Sam and boys like him, it is of course only natural to hold them up as examples to others. No boy can be a scamp and not suffer for it some way or other; and as to saying it's one's misfortune rather than one's fault that it is so, that is as ridiculous as to say, when you choose to walk north, that it is your misfortune you are not walking south.

But, in excuse for Sam, we must say that he was by no means the worst boy in our school, though he did get into the most rows, and was finally expelled in disgrace. If he had been deceitful or selfish, he would probably have escaped oftener than he did; but he never denied his faults or told tales of others. We who knew him generally found him good-natured and jovial; he looked upon himself as a far more desperate character than we ourselves did, and once I remember he solemnly charged me to take warning by his evil fate.

Still, you see, Sam sinned once too often. Even though his crimes were never more serious than putting guinea-pigs into the master's desk, yet that sort of conduct time after time is not to be tolerated in any school. The example set by a mischievous boy to his fellows is not good; and if his sc.r.a.pes are winked at always, the time will come when others will be encouraged to follow in his steps, and behave badly too.

Sam, no doubt, deserved the punishment he got; and because one bad boy who is punished is no worse than a dozen bad boys who get off, that does not make him out a good boy, or a boy more hardly treated than he merited.

Scapegraces are boys who, being mischievously inclined, are constantly transgressing the line between right and wrong. Up to a certain point, a boy of good spirits and fond of his joke, is as jolly a boy as one could desire; but when his good spirits break the bounds of order, and his jokes interfere with necessary authority, then it is time for him to be reminded nothing ought to be carried too far in this world.

One last word about scapegraces. Don't, like Sam, get it into your heads that you are destined to get into sc.r.a.pes, and that therefore it is no use trying to keep out of them. That would be a proof of nothing but your silliness. I can't tell you how it was Sam's stone always broke the window, or why the master's eye always fell on him when there was a row going on; but I can tell you this, that if Sam hadn't thrown the stone, the window would not have been broken; and that if he had behaved well when the master's eye was turned away, he would not have cut a poor figure when the door was opened. Some boys make a boast of the number of sc.r.a.pes they have been in, and fondly imagine themselves heroes in proportion to the number of times they have been flogged.

Well, if it pleases them to think so, by all means let them indulge the fancy; but we can at least promise them this--n.o.body else thinks so!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

THE UNORIGINAL BOY.