Maine, generally known as Freckles, had a couple of guinea-pigs in his desk for a week. Then Mannering, the classical master in the Fifth, who must have had a nose like a gimlet, smelt them at prayers, happening to come in late and kneeling down by Freckles at the time. The Doctor didn’t make much fuss then, because that was just at the beginning of the business; only he said a desk was not the place for guinea-pigs, and added that a chap in Freckles’s position in the school ought to have known it. He let the gardener look after them from that time forward. But Freckles naturally lost all interest in them after the gardener had them; because a guinea-pig merely _as_ a guinea-pig is nothing. Anyhow, it was rough on him to be landed over it, because, as a matter of fact, guinea-pigs have no scent worth mentioning, and nobody but Mannering would have spotted them. After that Gideon and Brookes caught a blind-worm one foot two inches long; and Gideon sold his half for fivepence, so Brookes got it all. Nobody knew what a blind-worm likes to eat, unfortunately, and it died, but not for a fortnight. Then there was another scene with my dormouse, which led to tremendous things. There’s a hole in a desk where the ink-pot goes in, and one day my mouse got out through it, having climbed up two dictionaries and a Greek Testament to do so. It happened old Briggs himself was taking the Lower Fourth, which is my class, and I hoped it would be all right. But he didn’t seem friendly over it, and I noticed, when he told us to find the mouse, he put his feet upon the rungs of his chair. It’s a rum thing about old Briggs that he doesn’t care much for natural history objects while they’re alive; he likes them dead and dried, or stuffed and pinned on cards, or in glass cases all labelled and neat. My dormouse gave us a jolly good hunt round, then it finally tripped over a lead-pencil and got its tail and hind legs into West’s ink. So we caught it, and I was drying it with a piece of blotting-paper, and old Briggs was just telling us that dormice belong to a genus of rodents called Myoxus, and are allied to mice, though they have a squirrel’s habits, which he seemed to think was a pity, when Dunston came in. The Doctor asked particulars, looked as if he could have jolly well killed my mouse, which was shivering rather badly owing to the ink on its hinder parts, and said once for all that he would allow no animals of any kind inside any of the desks or in school. Then, unluckily, as an afterthought, he demanded a clearance on the spot; and he was pretty well staggered to find the result. “I will ask you, Ferrars, as head boy of the class, and one, I am happy to think, above any of this childish folly, to inspect the desks, one by one, and report to me where you find indications of life,” said the Doctor.