THE boys who attended Mr. Morton’s Select School in the village of Laketon did not profess to know more than boys of the same age and advantages elsewhere; but of one thing they were absolutely certain, and that was that no teacher ever rang his bell to assemble the school or call the boys in from recess until just that particular instant when the fun in the school-yard was at its highest, and the boys least wanted to come in. A teacher might be very fair about some things: he might help a boy through a hard lesson, or give him fewer bad marks than he had earned; he might even forget to report to a boy’s parents all the cases of truancy in which their son had indulged; but when a teacher once laid his hand upon that dreadful bell and stepped to the window, it really seemed as if every particle of human sympathy went out of him.

On one bright May morning, however, the boys who made this regular daily complaint were few; indeed, all of them, except Bert Sharp, who had three consecutive absences to explain, and no written excuse from his father to help him out, were already inside the school-room, and even Bert stood where he could look through the open door while he cudgelled his wits and smothered his conscience in the endeavor to frame an explanation that might seem plausible. The boys already inside lounged near any desks but their own, and conversed in low tones about almost everything except the subject uppermost in their minds, this subject being a handsome but rather sober-looking boy of about fourteen years, who was seated at a desk in the back part of the room, and trying, without any success whatever, to look as if he did not know that all the other boys were looking at him.

It was not at all wonderful that the boys stared, for none of them had ever before seen the new pupil, and Laketon was so small a town that the appearance of a strange boy was almost as unusual an event as the coming of a circus.

“Let’s give it up,” said Will Palmer, who had for five minutes been discussing with several other boys all sorts of improbabilities about the origin of the new pupil; “let’s give it up until roll-call; then we’ll learn his name, and that’ll be a little comfort.”

“I wish Mr. Morton would hurry, then,” said Benny Mallow. “I came early this morning to see if I couldn’t win back my striped alley from Ned Johnston, and this business has kept us from playing a single game. Quick, boys, quick! Mr. Morton’s getting ready to touch the bell.”

The group separated in an instant, and every member was seated before the bell struck; so were most of the other boys, and so many pairs of eyes looked inquiringly at the teacher that Mr. Morton himself had to bite his lower lip very hard to keep from laughing as he formally rang the school to order. As the roll was called, the boys answered to their names in a prompt, sharp, business-like way, quite unusual in school-rooms; and as the call proceeded, the responses became so quick as to sometimes get a little ahead of the names that the boys knew were coming.

Suddenly, as the names beginning with G were reached, and Charlie Gunter had his mouth wide open, ready to say “Here,” the teacher called, “Paul Grayson.”

“Here!” answered the new boy.

A slight sensation ran through the school; no boy did anything for which he had to be called to order, yet somehow the turning of heads, the catching of breath, and the letting go of breath that had been held in longer than usual, made a slight commotion, which reached the ears of the strange pupil, and made him look rather more ill at ease than before.

The answers to the roll became at once less spirited; indeed, Benny Mallow was staring so hard, now that he had a name to increase his interest in the stranger, that he forgot entirely to answer to his name, and was compelled to sit on the chair beside the teacher’s desk from that moment until recess.

That recess seemed longer in coming than any other that the school had ever known—longer even than that memorable one in which a strolling trio of Italian musicians had been specially contracted with to begin playing in the school-yard the moment the boys came down. Finally, however, the bell rang half-past ten, and the whole roomful hurried down-stairs, but not before Mr. Morton had called Joe Appleby, the largest boy in school, and formally introduced Paul Grayson, with the expressed wish that he should make his new companion feel at home among the boys.

Appleby went about his work with an air that showed how fully he realized the importance of his position: he introduced Grayson to every boy, beginning with the largest; and it was in vain that Benny Mallow, who was the youngest of the party, made all sorts of excuses to throw himself in the way of the distinguished couple, even to the extent of once getting his feet badly mixed up with those of Grayson. When, however, the ceremony ended, and Appleby was at liberty, so many of the boys crowded around him that the new pupil was in some danger of being lonely.

“Find out for yourselves,” was Appleby’s dignified reply to his questioners. “I don’t consider it gentlemanly to tell everything I know about a man.”

At this rebuke the smaller boys considered Appleby a bigger man than ever before, but some of the larger ones hinted that Appleby couldn’t very well tell what he didn’t know, at which Appleby took offence, and joined the group of boys who were leaning against a fence, in the shade of which Will Palmer had already inveigled the new boy into conversation.

“By-the-way,” said Will, “there’s time yet for a game or two of ball. Will you play?”

“Yes, I’ll be glad to,” said Grayson.

“Who else?” asked Will.

“I!” shouted all of the boys, who did not forget their grammar so far as to say “Me!” instead. Really, the eagerness of the boys to play ball had never before been equalled in the memory of any one present, and Will Palmer cooled off some quite warm friends by his inability to choose more than two boys to complete the quartette for a common game of ball. It did the disappointed boys a great deal of good to hear the teacher’s bell ring just as Will Palmer “caught himself in” to Grayson’s bat.

“You play a splendid game,” said Will to Grayson, as they went up-stairs side by side. “Where did you learn it?”

Joe Appleby, who was on the step in front of the couple, dragged just an instant in order to catch the expected information, but all he got was a bump from Palmer that nearly tumbled him forward on his dignified nose, as Grayson answered,

“Oh, in several places; nowhere in particular.”

Palmer immediately determined that he would follow his new schoolmate home at noon, and discover where he lived. Then he would interview the neighbors, and try to get some information ahead of that stuck-up Joe Appleby, who, considering he was only four months older than Palmer himself, put on too many airs for anything. But when school was dismissed, Palmer was disgusted at noting that at least half of the other boys were distributing themselves for just such an operation as the one he had planned. Besides, Grayson did not come down-stairs with the crowd. Could it be possible that he was from the country, and had brought a cold lunch to school with him? Palmer hurried up the stairs to see, but met the teacher and the new boy coming down, and the two walked away, and together entered the house of old Mrs. Bartle, where Mr. Morton boarded.

“He’s a boarding scholar,” exclaimed Benny Mallow. “I’ve read of such things in books.”

“Then he’ll be stuck up,” declared Joe Appleby.

This opinion was delivered with a shake of the head that seemed to intimate that Joe had known all the ways of boarding-scholars for thousands of years; so most of the boys looked quite sober for a moment or two. Finally Sam Wardwell, whose father kept a store, broke the silence by remarking, “I’ll bet he’s from Boston; his coat is of just the same stuff as one that a drummer wears who comes to see father sometimes.”

“Umph!” grunted Appleby; “do you suppose Boston has some kinds of cloth all to itself? You don’t know much.”

The smaller boys seemed to side with the senior pupil in this opinion; so Sam felt very uncomfortable, and vowed silently that he would bring a piece of chalk to school that very afternoon, and do some rapid sketching on the back of Appleby’s own coat. Then Benny Mallow said: “Say, boys, this old school must be a pretty good one, after all, if people somewhere else send boarders to it. His folks must be rich: did you notice what a splendid knife he cut his finger-nails with?—’twas a four-blader, with a pearl handle. But of course you didn’t see it, and I did; he used it in school, and my desk is right beside his.”

Will Palmer immediately led Benny aside, and offered him a young fan-tail pigeon, when his long-expected brood was hatched, to change desks, if the teacher’s permission could be obtained. Meanwhile Napoleon Nott, who generally was called Notty, and who had more imagination than all the rest of the boys combined, remarked, “I believe he’s a foreign prince in disguise.”

“He’s well-bred, anyhow,” said Will Palmer to Benny Mallow. “I hope he’ll be man enough to stand no nonsense. He’s big enough, and smart enough, if looks go for anything, to run this school, and I’d like to see him do it—anything to get rid of Joe Appleby’s airs.”

Then the various groups separated, moved by the appetites that boys in good health always have. One boy, however—Joe Appleby—was man enough to deny his palate when greater interests devolved upon him, so he made some excuse to go back to the school-room, so as to be there when the teacher and his new charge returned. Half an hour later Benny Mallow, who had sneaked away from home as soon as the dessert had been brought in, and had vulgarly eaten his pie as he walked along the street—Benny Mallow walked into the school-room, and beheld the teacher, Joe Appleby, and Paul Grayson standing together as if they had been talking. As Benny went to his seat Joe followed him, and bestowed upon him a look of such superiority that Benny determined at once that some marvellous mystery must have been revealed, and that Joe was the custodian of the entire thing. Benny was so full of this fancy that he slipped down-stairs and told it as fact to each boy who appeared, the result being to make Joe Appleby a greater man than ever in the eyes of the school, while Grayson became a tormenting yet most invaluable mystery.