The Task-Ticket system presented another feature of interest. Besides their regulation ten ordinary tickets, Mr. Pocklington's pupils were entitled to acquire "Special Task-Tickets." If you weeded the garden, or filled some ink-pots, or wrote a specially neat copy, you were presented with a Task-Ticket marked "Special" in red ink in one corner. Next time a breakdown in work or the infraction of a rule brought you within the sphere of operations of Mr. Pocklington's penal code, exemption from punishment could be purchased by payment of one or more of your Special Task-Tickets. This scheme was attractive in several ways. Good children--chiefly little girls, it must be admitted--accumulated these treasures assiduously for the mere joy of possession, the trifling fact that their owners were far too virtuous to be likely ever to have need of them being more than counterbalanced by the comfortable glow of satisfaction with which the existence of such a moral bank-balance suffused their rather self-righteous little bosoms. Wicked children, on the other hand, would laboriously collect tickets against a rainy day, and, having accumulated a sufficient store to pay for the consequences, would indulge in a prolonged orgy of sin until the last ticket was gone. Thomas Oates once found ten Special Task-Tickets in an old desk, and having straightway filled a like number of buttoned boots in the girls' dressing-room with soap-and-water, proffered the same in compensation. However, the possession of so much hoarded virtue in such a proclaimed reprobate roused the suspicions of the authorities. Inquiries were set on foot, the fraud was discovered, and Thomas was only saved from expulsion from Wentworth House School by the intercession of pretty Miss Amelia, who cherished a weakness for all renegades of the opposite sex.