But before he could finish his sentence, Tom came up, and laid down a dozen old spikes and nails. Both of them turned and looked proudly at the doctor. “Look here, boys,” cried the doctor, standing up; “what--” He was interrupted by Phil, who came forward between him and the first boys, carrying an iron pot, which he triumphantly placed on a handsomely bound Hebrew Lexicon. “What in the world--” began the doctor again, but was again interrupted by Arthur, who solemnly placed the colter on a new edition of Longinus, and then put the chain on some late English Quarterly Reviews. Just as the doctor was about to burst forth, Bart came immediately before him, and, with a face radiant with delight, laid down, right on the doctors blotting pad, that horrible, discolored, and disintegrated old bone. [Illustration: 0173] For a moment it seemed that the doctor would burst forth in a fury. To him this behavior was the sublimity of unparalleled impudence; the act was so absolutely unequalled in its quiet audacity, that it actually made him dumb with amazement. The ploughshare, the colter, the iron pot, the rusty spikes and bolts, the old chain,--all these were so many stages up which his astonishment went to a climax which was fully attained when Bart put down the abominable old bone. This was too much. Then the doctor burst forth. But not in fierce and furious indignation, and vehement and violent denunciation. It struck him in another way. It was his sense of the ridiculous that was affected. He forgot the ruin done to his precious editions of the classics, and his mind could only grasp the innocent, smiling faces of these five young rascals who had come into the awful seclusion of his own study to pile up his inviolable study table with old iron and old bones. And so it was that the doctor burst forth into an uncontrollable fit of laughter,--not a common laugh, but one which was sent forth from the very depths of his nature,--all absorbing, overwhelming. Peal after peal, irrepressible. It was contagious, too. The boys caught it. They tried to restrain themselves at first. They tittered. They began to see themselves the absurdity of their act. The thought overcame them, and they all burst forth, too. The whole company thus went off into fearful explosions--cataclysms, in fact, of laughter. It roused the house. The family came running up to see the cause. The doctor could not utter a word. Tears were running from his eyes; he could only point in silence to the old iron and old bone. The contagion seized upon the family also, and they all went off into the general laughter.