[THE PROTEST AGAINST SINKERS]
The feeling of revolt sprang up at chapel during the head master's weekly talk. Ordinarily the school awaited these moments with expectation, received them with tolerance and drew from them all the humour that could be extracted.
These little heart-to-heart talks brought joy to many an overweighted brain and obliterated momentarily the slow, dragging months of slush and hail. They also added, from time to time, picturesque expressions to the school vocabulary—and for that much was forgiven them. No one who heard it will ever forget the slashing that descended from the rostrum on the demon tobacco, in its embodied vice, the cigarette, nor the chill that ran over each of the four hundred cigarette smokers as the head master, with his boring glance straight on him, concluded:
"Yes, I know what you boys will say; I know what your plea will be when you are caught. You will come to me and you'll say with tears in your eyes, with tears:
"'Doctor, think of my mother—my poor mother—it will kill my mother!'
"I tell you, now is the time to think of your mother; now is the time to spare her grey hairs. Every cigarette you boys smoke is a nail in the coffin of your mother."
It was terrific. The school was unanimous in its verdict that the old man had outdone himself. Boys, whom a whiff of tobacco rendered instantly ill, smoked up the ventilators that night with shivers of delight, and from that day to this a cigarette has never been called anything but a coffin-nail.
Only the week before, in announcing the suspension of Corkscrew Higgins (since with the ministry), for, among other offences, mistaking the initials on the hat of Bucky Oliver as his own, the head master in his determination to abolish forever such deadly practices, had given forth the following:
"Young gentlemen, it is my painful duty, my very painful duty, to announce to you the suspension of the boy Higgins. The boy Higgins was a sloth, the boy Higgins was the prince of sloths! The boy Higgins was a gambler, the boy Higgins was the prince of gamblers! The boy Higgins was a liar, the boy Higgins was the prince of liars! The boy Higgins was a thief, the boy Higgins was the prince of thieves! Therefore, the boy Higgins will no longer be a member of this community!"