"Eat too much!"--they could hardly believe their ears. Had the head master of the school, with years of personal experience, actually, in his sober mind, proclaimed that they ate too much! The words had been said; the accusation had to stand. And such a time to proclaim it--in the month of sliced bananas and canned vegetables! The protest that rumbled and growled in the under-form houses exploded in the Dickinson. It so happened that for days there had been a dull grumbling about the monotony of the daily meals and the regularity and frequency of the appearance of certain abhorrent dishes, known as "scrag-birds and sinkers." "Scrag-bird" was a generic term, allowing a wide latitude for conjecture, but "sinker" was an opprobrious epithet dedicated to a particularly hard, doughy substance that under more favourable auspices sometimes, without fear of contradiction, achieves the name of "dumpling." The "sinker" was, undoubtedly, the deadliest enemy of the growing boy--the most persistent, the most malignant. It knew no laws and it defied all restraint. It languished in the spring, but thrived and multiplied amazingly in the canned, winter term. It was as likely to bob up in a swimming dish of boiled chicken as it was certain to accompany a mutton stew. It associated at times with veal and attached itself to corned beef; it concealed itself in a beefsteak pie and clung to a leg of lamb. What the red rag is to the bull, the pudgy white of the "sinker" was to the boys, who, in a sort of desperate hope of exterminating the species, never allowed one to return intact to the kitchen. Twice a week was the allotted appearance of the "sinker"; at a third visit grumbling would break out; at a fourth arose threats of leaving for Andover or Exeter, of writing home, of boycotting the luncheon. Now, it so happened that during the preceding week the "sinker" had inflicted itself not four, but actually six, times on that community of aching voids. The brutal accusation of the head master was the spark to the powder. The revolt assumed head and form during the day, and a call for a meeting of protest was unanimously made for that very night. The boys met with the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, resolved to defend their liberties and assert their independence. The inevitable Doc Macnooder was to address the meeting. He spoke naturally, fluently, with great sounding phrases, on any occasion, on any topic, for his own pure delight, and he always continued to speak until violently suppressed.