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.