“_Boys_,” said Mr. Long, in a cold and constrained voice, “None of you will accuse me of ever interfering with legitimate sport, or will think that I am destitute of sympathy with boyish ways and manners. I think you know me well enough to believe that I take a deep interest in everything that can make you enjoy yourselves here; that I want you to love this place with all your hearts, and through all your after lives to look back upon Grand Pré Academy with the most affectionate recollection. That very feeling I have now, and it is this that animates me while I call upon you to give an account of those disturbances in which you have been engaged. “You see a line must be drawn somewhere,” he continued. “Your affair at the French cellar was not altogether what it ought to have been, and I do not approve of it at all. Apart from the lateness of the hour, there was about the whole transaction an air of wildness--a certain headlong recklessness of sport, which I should rather check than indulge. Still, I have nothing to say about that now. You seem to have gone into that affair with an impetuosity of pure fun, that blinded you to anything objectionable which might have been in it. Besides, you have already told all about that, and in a whimsical way that disarmed all reproof. “But, boys,” resumed Mr. Long, in a severer tone, “this last affair has been really a serious offence against discipline. The school has been disturbed, it seems, for many nights. There have been all kinds of noises; howlings, yellings, and screechings, of all sorts; rappings and knockings. Now, all these things may be very funny to the contrivers of them, but you are surely old enough to know that they may be excessively dangerous to sensitive minds. Did you not think of the poor little fellows here who might receive a serious mental shock from such disturbances? Is it possible that you could have been blind to all things except your own selfish amusement? Is this the sort of thing that is becoming to you--you,” he repeated, “from whom I hoped nothing but examples of manliness, and generosity, and frankness, and chivalry? I will not believe that it is possible for you to fail in these qualities. I trust rather to what I _know_ of you, and I will attribute all this to nothing except utter thoughtlessness on your part. And it is that very thoughtlessness, if nothing worse, that I blame. It was not worthy of you; it was utterly beneath you. It was a very serious offence.” The boys fairly writhed under all this, and Bart, with his face flushing scarlet, and his eyes gleaming with excited feeling, was about to speak; but Mr. Long commanded silence with his uplifted hand.