"My dear fellow, my desk was a sweety shop some days; they used to hide their packets in every corner of it, then they would come to me and say: 'Please, sir, my pockie is in the wee corner on the right; dinna let onybody touch it.' Who put them in?" I asked.
"Gladys Miller."
"You have all the luck," I said. "Gladys always buys liquorice rolls, you know them ... little yellow sweets with the sugarelly inside. Man, I love yon sweets ... and Gladys knew it, the besom!"
"Oh! It's all very well for you to make a joke of it," he said with annoyance, "but I tell you I don't like it, and after to-day I guess it'll be a long time till anybody opens my desk again. I talked to Gladys to some tune I can tell you."
I sighed wearily and filled my pipe.
"Two years!" said Macdonald musingly, "two years! What about all your private books? Anybody might have read your Log Book, or destroyed it even!" and the thought almost made him turn pale.
"And what about it? Nobody will ever read it anyway."
"Eh?" His mouth gaped at this latest heresy.
"What about it?" I continued, "what about the whole damned lot of registers and log books and Form 9 b's? I didn't care a rap who saw the inside of my desk or my log book. As a matter of fact no one saw what was in the log; never a child opened it. Why? Because there was no prohibition. You lock up all the blamed things and put the fear of God on any kid that dares touch your desk ... result! they look on all your belongings as forbidden fruit, and if they can handle your log book when you are safely out of the way you bet your boots that they'll do it. Can't you see that children are really decent kindly creatures with their own philosophy, that is, their own idea of the importance of things? What is important to them is a toy or a dogfight or a quarrel or a love affair. They don't want to touch stodgy official books. But when you say to them: 'This desk is holy ground' why, every self-respecting kid has but one ambition in life ... to poke his nose into your desk and hide your registers."
"Well," he said with a grim smile, "what about those tools in the woodwork room? If children are the saints you make them out to be, how did your boys come to spoil good tools?"