"I am Findley Holbrook."
Doctor Wells, whose face looked young in spite of the gray hair at his temples, got up from his chair and shook hands gravely. "I'm glad to see you, Findley," he said; "I hope you're going to like the school and that the school will like you. We've assigned you to Gannett Hall; I'll have one of the masters take you over and introduce you to the boys who've already come. We don't do much to-day except get settled. Did you bring your things?"
"My father is going to bring them up this noon," Findley replied. "I thought I'd better come early to start in with the other fellows."
Doctor Wells put him in charge of Mr. Stevens, who took him over to Gannett Hall, a three-story building with its ivy-covered front to the campus and its back to the tennis courts. A dozen boys were standing on the steps; they had been talking and laughing, but as the newcomer approached them with the master, their voices died away and they paused in their conversations. A black-haired boy, tall and heavily built, immediately called out:
"Hello, Teeny-bits!"
The new boy recognized the one who had hailed him as Tracey Campbell, who had been in the class above him in the public school at Greensboro. "Teeny-bits" was the name by which Findley Holbrook had been known ever since he could remember and to hear himself thus addressed brought to him a momentarily pleasant feeling, even though Tracey Campbell had never been a special friend of his. When Findley was younger he had been so small that some one had called him "Teeny-bits" and the name had stuck. At the public school in Greensboro, in the village of Hamilton, in his home, every one called him Teeny-bits, and though the name did not apply to him now as appropriately as it had applied when he was four or five years younger, it still fitted him so well that no one questioned it.
Mr. Stevens smiled as he heard it from Tracey Campbell's lips and glanced at his young companion. A compact, slim body somewhat under the average height for seventeen, square shoulders, a very youthful mouth, eyes that seemed older than the rest of him and light brown, almost tow-colored hair, were the characteristics of Teeny-bits Holbrook that Mr. Stevens, the English master, saw. He said to himself that Teeny-bits was an apt nickname.
There were other characteristics that Mr. Stevens did not see; one of them revealed itself half an hour after the master had introduced Teeny-bits to the members of the school who occupied the third-floor rooms in Gannett Hall. The newcomer found himself possessed of a small and plain, but comfortable room, in which a bed, a chest of drawers, a table and two chairs were the chief articles of furniture. It looked out on the tennis courts and commanded a view of Hamilton village with its twin church spires sticking up through the trees like white spar-buoys out of a green sea. It made Teeny-bits a little homesick to look down there. His thoughts were quickly turned in other directions, however. Several of the boys came into his room, led by a tall, over-grown fellow who had been standing on the steps of the hall when Teeny-bits had entered. He came in at the head of the others, grinning confidently as if he were looking forward to something that would provide amusement.
"Friends," he said in the stagey sort of voice that a person might use in talking to an audience, "meet Teeny-bits—that's his name."
The boys behind the leader smiled in a way that suggested something else about to happen.