Little Wideawake: A story book for little children

by Mrs. Sale Barker

UNCLE JOHN’S SCHOOL-DAYS.

This picture reminds me, children, of some funny stories that I have heard your Uncle John tell, when he and I were boy and girl together, of his exploits as a schoolboy. According to his account, not only he, but most of his schoolfellows, used to lead merry lives enough at school. They had a great deal of what he called excellent fun, though I am afraid it sometimes bordered upon mischief or naughtiness. I used to consider that he and his schoolfellows were regular heroes, as I listened to his stories when he came home for the holidays; and even now I must confess I cannot help laughing when I think of some of his naughty pranks.

Uncle John first went to a large school when he was eleven years old, and I remember now the tremendous hamper of good things he took with him. The boys who slept in his bedroom were so pleased with the contents of his hamper that they determined to make a great feast. To add to their enjoyment they imagined themselves to be settlers in the back woods of America or Australia. They built a log-hut with bolsters, and had a sort of pic-nic. One of them mounted on the top of the log-hut to look out with his telescope for any approaching savages, while the others enjoyed their suppers in and about the hut. When their fun was at its height, the door softly opened, and in walked Dr. Birchall, spectacles on nose, and cane in hand. What followed may be imagined.

You would not recognize Uncle John himself, whom you know only as a man six feet high, in that little lad on the right hand side of the picture, half hiding under the bedclothes. As a new boy he had no share either in the riot or its punishment; except indeed in so far as his hamper had supplied the means of riot. Still, what he saw made a deep impression on his mind; and particularly he thought a great deal of the inconvenience arising from the sudden appearance of the master.

You know that Uncle John is an engineer now, and even as a little boy he had a great turn for mechanical inventions. Well, he pondered over some means by which such a sudden interruption to the enjoyment of his schoolfellows might be prevented in future; and I will tell you what he did.

It happened that the large room in which he slept formed the upper floor of a wing of the house, which had been added to it when it became a school; and there was no access to this room from the principal staircase of the house. You had to pass through the room below, and go up a little separate staircase to reach to floor above. The lower room was also a bedroom for the boys, and Uncle John’s little scheme was this:—

He made a hole with a gimlet in the frame of one of the windows of his bedroom, passed a piece of string through the hole, and carried it outside the wall of the house down to a similar hole in a window-frame of the room below. To the end of the string in the upper room was fastened a small rattle, while the other end of the string—that in the room below—was taken into the bed of a boy who slept near the window.

This admirable little invention once in order, there was more rioting in the upper room than ever; and the master, disturbed by the noise, soon went, cane in hand, to stop it. The instant he set foot in the lower room, the boy there who held the string in bed gave it a little pull; the rattle sounded—ting! ting!—in the room above, and in an instant every boy was in bed and snoring. Perhaps they had been playing at leap-frog the moment before, but as Dr. Birchall entered the room—and he crept up the staircase very quietly that he might catch them unawares—he found some twenty boys lying in bed, seemingly sound asleep, though snoring unnaturally loud.

The doctor was so disconcerted by this unexpected state of things that he retired at once, fancying perhaps that his ears had deceived him when he thought he had heard a noise in the room. The same thing happened two or three times: the doctor was puzzled, and the invention appeared a complete success; but at last all was discovered.