While they were unpacking their boxes, which were, it must be admitted, widely different in character and contents, Harry Venniker received a good many visits from old friends who had known him at home or at school, who greeted him and were greeted by him with much cordiality, passed some merry jokes with him at the expense of two or three of the masters and of their houses, which were declared to be in all respects vastly inferior to Mr. Brandiston’s, so that the boys professed themselves unable to imagine how ‘any decent chap’ could go into such ‘holes,’ and informed him in a congratulatory spirit that Stanley had been heard to express the intention of conferring upon him the singular honour of choosing him as one of his fags. Nobody asked for Gerald Eversley, or addressed any word to him, though to one of the boys who came into the room Harry Venniker introduced him as ‘an old friend of mine,’ using a form of speech not unnatural to schoolboys to whom a day is a long time, and a ceremony or practice which came into use a year ago is as if it had existed since the Creation. The business of unpacking boxes, interrupted as it was by numerous sallies of Harry Venniker to the window or the door, for the purpose of taking observations or renewing acquaintances, filled a considerable time. Then there was the further business of adorning the walls with pictures and trophies. Poor Gerald endured a fresh mortification at finding that he was expected to have brought certain decorative ornaments with him, and that he had not brought them. But Harry with great good nature did his best to set him at ease. He produced from the bottom of one of his boxes a number of engravings, all of a sporting kind, exhibiting with rare uniformity the triumphs of human skill over wild boars, elks, tigers, bears, and lions, to say nothing of the various species of British game, an enormous stag’s head--a ‘royal’ he called it, but Gerald had no idea what he meant--the trophy of his father’s prowess in sport, a clock, a hand-screen, two cabinet photographs of his father and mother, and the picture of a beautiful girl whom he explained a little apologetically to be his sister Ethel, a year younger than himself, ‘a real good sort, you know, for a girl; it was she who gave me this knife just as I was starting. Now we’re beginning to look a little shipshape,’ he continued; but just then the bell rang, and the two boys went downstairs with all the others for prayers in the hall.