Many years ago I had a schoolfellow and bosom friend whom I knew as Billy, but whose name as it stood in the Register was William Xavier Plosive. Where his family came from, or where they got their outlandish name, I know not. From its rarity I infer that the Plosive stock has not multiplied lavishly on the earth. Only twice, since the days of my friendship with Billy, have I encountered that name. There is, or was, a wayside public-house in Devonshire, the landlord of which was a Plosive; it bore the sign of the "Dog and Ladle," which the signboard interpreted by a picture of a large retriever in precipitate flight with a tin ladle tied to his tail. The other Plosive of my acquaintance kept a shop in a Canadian city; he was a French half-breed, and, as I have heard, a great rascal. Billy's father was said to have been a Roman Catholic; and I infer from the name he bestowed on his son that he had a turn for waggishness of a sort. Plosive senior must have foreseen what would happen. No sooner, of course, was the name William X. Plosive seen on the outside of the poor boy's copy-books than a whisper passed through the whole school--"Billy Burst." And that name remained with him to the end. It was more appropriate than its bestowers knew. "_When_ did Billy burst?" "_Why_ did Billy burst?" "Will Billy burst again?" and a hundred questions of the like order were asked all day long apropos of nothing. They were shouted in the playground. They were whispered in the class. They broke the silence of the dormitory in the dead of night. With them we relieved our pent-up feelings in hours of tedium or of gloom. Introduced _pianissimo_, they profaned the daily half-hour devoted to the study of Divinity. Innumerable impositions followed in their train. One morning the Rev. Cyril Puttock, M.A., who "took" us in Divinity, saw written large on the blackboard in front of him these words: "What burst Billy?" I spent my next half-holiday in writing out the Beatitudes a hundred times. Billy and I slept in the same dormitory and our beds were side by side. Both of us were bad sleepers, and many a deep affinity did our souls discover in the silent watches of the night. As a place to observe the workings of telepathy I know of no spot on earth to compare with the dormitory of a boarding-school. The atmosphere of our dormitory was, if I may say so, in a state of chronic telepathic saturation, and the area where the currents ran strongest was in the space between Billy's bed and mine. This is the sort of thing that would go on: "Billy, are you awake?" "Yes; I knew _you_ were." "Shall we talk?" "I want to, ever so." "I say, we are going to have that beastly pudding for dinner to-morrow." "That's just what I want to talk about." "I've got an idea. Billy, I found out yesterday where they cook those puddings. They boil them in the copper of the outhouse, and the cook leaves them there while she looks after the rest of the dinner."