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 assortment 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, balls, worms, stale sandwiches, photographs, toffee, birds' eggs, keys, money, knives, cherry stones, silkworms, marbles, pencils, handkerchiefs, tarts, gum, sleeve links, and walnut shells.

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.