One of the most curious and characteristic institutions at Wentworth House School was Mr. Pocklington's system of "Task-Tickets." Every boy and girl on entering the school received ten little tablets about the size of visiting-cards, inscribed with his or her name, and numbered from one to ten consecutively. If a pupil failed in a lesson or broke a rule, one of his Task-Tickets was impounded, and was not restored until the faulty lesson was perfected or a specified imposition performed. Periodically there would be an "inspection," and many a small head whose owner was discovered to be short of tickets would be hung in shame that day. Only such confirmed reprobates as Thomas Oates, the bad boy of the school (whom Mr. Pocklington in his more jocular moments addressed as "Titus," much to his hearers' mystification), could endure the stigma of being perpetually without a full complement. Thomas indeed once electrified the school by announcing to Miss Mary, when asked for a ticket in default of an unlearned lesson, that _all_ his tickets were in pawn already, and that, until he had redeemed one of the same, he would be unable to oblige her. Mr. Pocklington and the majority of his staff were horror-struck at such iniquity; but Miss Mary, in whom was concentrated most of the common sense of the family, instituted a search in Master Thomas's desk, with the result that she triumphantly fished out no less than five tickets. All of which goes to prove that Thomas Oates, like a good many of us, preferred notoriety, even as a malefactor, to respectable oblivion.