He dragged himself to his feet, picked his cane from the wastepaper basket and dealt two echoing blows to the lower panels of the door. The studies in Matheson's were in a line, opening out of the long Hall where the juniors lived and worked and ragged and had their lockers. Two kicks on a study door meant that the monitor inside required a fag, and it was the business of the junior in Hall at that moment--"lag of Hall," as he was called--to eliminate time and space in answering the summons. Two blows of a cane indicated a potential execution. A sudden silence descended on Hall; two light feet jumped over a form, there was a hurried knocking, and a breathless, scared junior thrust his head in at the door. "Send O'Rane here." Through the hushed Hall a sigh of relief went up from the forty odd boys who were _not_ O'Rane. The name was shouted by one after another, like the summons of a witness in Court. "O'Rane! O'Rane! Spitfire, you're wanted! What's it for, Spitfire? Hurry up, they're muck sick if you keep 'em waiting!" Mayhew's voice sympathetically murmured, "Bad luck, old man!" Then there came a second knock at the door. Loring stood with his back to the fire, bending his cane into an arc round one knee. "Have you been down to Little End this week?" he asked. "No." "You know you have to go four times a week?" "Yes." "Have you leave off from Matheson?" "No." "Do you wish to appeal?" Within living memory no boy in Matheson's had ever exercised his right of appeal--a tribute, I hope, to the substantial justice of succeeding generations of monitors. O'Rane looked round at the four of us with a mixture of sullenness and timidity in his expressive black eyes. "Guess I'm up against some blamed rule?" he hazarded. Loring nodded. "Then there's mighty little use in plaguing old man Matheson." Loring threw his cane over to Draycott, the captain of football. "Clear Hall," he said to O'Rane. On receipt of the order there was a scuffling of feet as forty boys jumped up from tables, forms and window-seats. "Clear Hall" was taken up as the marching refrain, and, as the monitors filed in by one door, the last stragglers hurried out by the other, and eighty critical, experienced ears were expectantly strained to appraise the artistry of Draycott's execution. Loring, who was equally averse from thrashing a boy or being present when another carried out the sentence, crossed the room and gazed out of the window. It was soon over. O'Rane hurried out of Hall, breathing quickly and with rather a flushed face. As he opened the door, interested voices chorused, "Bad luck, Spitfire!" "Who did it?" "I say, you got it pretty tight, Spitfire!" "Was it Draycott? He's not bad for a beginner." We filed back to the study; the date, offence and victim's name were entered in the Black Book and initialled by Draycott, and we dispersed to our own quarters.