Within the first days of the trial week Mr. Wriford's duties fall into a regular routine. This is his trial week, his temporary week, a week in which he comes to his duties overwrought, shaken, uncertain and, thus conditioned, is wretched in his performance of them. Shortly before nine he presents himself at Tower House. The boys are wandering dejectedly about the playground. He passes nervously through them--they do not raise their caps--and hides from them in the schoolroom till the hour strikes on a neighbouring church clock. Then Mr. Wriford rings a large hand-bell, and the boys drift in at their leisure and take their places on the benches. Sometimes, before Mr. Wriford has finished ringing, Mr. Pennyquick, in gown and untasselled mortar-board, comes charging across the playground from the house, and there is then an alarmed stampede on the part of the boys to get in before him or to crowd in immediately upon his heels. Sometimes there is a very long wait before the appearance of the Headmaster; and Mr. Wriford, nervously irresolute as to whether to ring again or to begin school without him, stands wretched and self-conscious at his raised desk while the boys titter and whisper, or throw paper pellets, or look at him and--he knows--titter and whisper at his expense. This is his trial week, his temporary week. He is much overwrought in body and in mind. He does not know what authority he should show or how to show it. He hesitates till too late to interfere with one outburst of horse-play or of giggling. At the next he hesitates in doubt as to whether, having overlooked the former, he can attempt to subdue this. While he hesitates, and while the noise increases, and while the humiliation and wretchedness it causes him increase--in the midst of all this Mr. Pennyquick charges in. Mr. Pennyquick is either unshaved and looking the worse for it; or he has shaved and has cut himself and dabs angrily at little tufts of cotton wool that decorate his chin. "Anderson!" barks Mr. Pennyquick, seizing the roll-call book and a pencil but not looking at the one or using the other. "Adsum," responds Anderson; and Mr. Pennyquick barks through the roll, which he knows by heart, much as if he were a sheep-dog with each boy a sheep and each name a bark or a bite in pursuit of it. He does not wait for responses. He barks along in a jumble of explosions, interspersed with a jumble of squeaked replies; punctuated at intervals, as if it were part of the roll, by a very much louder bark in the form of a fierce "SPEAK UP!" and concluded by a rush without pause into prayers--Mr. Pennyquick plumping suddenly upon his knees, much as if the sheepdog had suddenly hurled itself upon the flock, and the first portion of the devotions being lost in the din of his pupils extricating themselves from their desks in order to follow his example, much as if the flock had responded by a panic stampede in every direction.