The great fault with the Westcott lads was their thoughtlessness. They had never known the sting of poverty, nor suffered from the want of anything which it was at all desirable that they should have. Some of them had feeble sense of the sacredness of property; a thing that could be bought by a small requisition on their pocket-money possessed in their eyes slight value. When Wilmot unscrewed an electric-light bulb in the lower hall and flung it the whole length of the play room to smash into a hundred pieces against the brick wall, he was simply yielding to a reckless impulse of fun. He would have taken his punishment without complaint if he had been caught, and he would have confessed the deed honestly if he had been questioned; but he had no idea that he was stealing. When Cable dropped a new stiff hat at the cloak-room door, and half a dozen rascals immediately kicked it into tatters, they thought they were having fun with Cable—until after an interview with Mr. Westcott. If a book was left about the halls,—the owner had no business to drop his books around,—some one was quite likely to use it as a missile on his way out. Talbot and Hardie and Harrison and others of the older boys regarded such an act as “kiddish”; Wilmot would commit it because of uncontrolled recklessness, Dunn because he was a fool. It was the laboratory at the top of the building that offered to heedless spirits the greatest temptation. Here both the chemistry and the physics classes performed their experiments and made their recitations. Mr. Cary, the instructor, was neither incompetent nor a weakling; but he couldn’t be in the laboratory all the time nor in all parts of it at the same time. Interesting experiments were tried that had no place in the text-book. For two weeks a jar hidden in the corner served as a receptacle for odds and ends of chemicals, and was visited surreptitiously every day by various members of the class, curious to see what new color it had taken on. Reeves discovered that a cent could be silvered by dipping it in nitric acid, then in mercury, and then, for an instant, in the acid again. Thereupon a mania for silvering objects suddenly developed which had to be repressed by official order. With a piece of glass tubing drawn to a point and attached by a rubber hose to a faucet, Trask found that he could throw a fine jet of water to a considerable distance. He used to train this with great effect on persons standing yards away, the spray being invisible but very distinctly felt. It struck Hardie one day in the back of the neck just above his collar, as he was standing beside Mr. Cary’s desk. He couldn’t turn round or dodge the stream, for Mr. Cary was looking over his note-book, and any movement would have betrayed the offenders. So he stood helpless, furtively swabbing with his handkerchief at the back of his head, but failing with all his efforts to dam the stream that trickled down his back.