Rabbits-Eggs was the local carrier -- an outcrop of the early Devonian formation. It was Stalky who had invented his unlovely name. `He was pretty average drunk, or he wouldn't have done it. Rabbits-Eggs is a little shy of me, somehow. But I swore it was pax between us, and gave him a bob. He stopped at two pubs on the way in, so he'll be howling drunk to-night. Oh, don't begin reading, Beetle; there's a council of war on. What the deuce is the matter with your collar?'

`Chivied Manders minor into the Lower Third box-room. 'Had all his beastly little friends on top of me,' said Beetle, from behind a jar of pilchards and a book.

`You ass! Any fool could have told you where Manders would bunk to,' said M`Turk.

`I didn't think,' said Beetle meekly, scooping out pilchards with a spoon.

`'Course you didn't. You never do.' M`Turk adjusted Beetle's collar with a savage tug. `Don't drop oil all over my "Fors," or I'll scrag you!'

`Shut up, you -- you Irish Biddy! 'Tisn't your beastly "Fors." It's one of mine.'

The book was a fat, brown-backed volume of the later Sixties, which King had once thrown at Beetle's head that Beetle might see whence the name Gigadibs came. Beetle had quietly annexed the book, and had seen -- several things. The quarter-comprehended verses lived and ate with him, as the be- dropped pages showed. He removed himself from all that world, drifting at large with wondrous Men and Women, till M`Turk hammered the pilchard spoon on his head and he snarled.

`Beetle! You're oppressed and insulted and bullied by King. Don't you feel it?'

`Let me alone! I can write some more poetry about him if I am, I suppose.'

`Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. `Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and M`Turk reads an ass called Ruskin; and --'

`Ruskin isn't an ass,' said M`Turk. `He's almost as good as the Opium-Eater. He says "we're children of noble races trained by surrounding art." That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading, or I'll shove a pilchard down your neck!'

`It's two to one,' said Stalky warningly, and Beetle closed the book, in obedience to the law under which he and his companions had lived for six checkered years.

The visitors looked on delighted. Number Five study had a reputation for more variegated insanity than the rest of the school put together; and so far as its code allowed friendship with outsiders it was polite and open-hearted to its neighbours on the same landing.

`What rot do you want now?' said Beetle.

`King! War!' said M`Turk, jerking his head toward the wall, where hung a small wooden West-African war- drum, a gift to M`Turk from a naval uncle.

`Then we shall be turned out of the study again,' said Beetle, who loved his flesh-pots. `Mason turned us out for -- just warbling on it.' Mason was that mathematical master who had testified in Common-room.

`Warbling? -- Oh, Lord!' said Abanazar. `We couldn't hear ourselves speak in our study when you played the infernal thing. What's the good of getting turned out of your study, anyhow?'

`We lived in the form-rooms for a week, too,' said Beetle tragically. `And it was beastly cold.'