The school pardoned the exaggeration in its admiration for the rhetoric, which was rated up to the oration against Catiline. But on the first Monday of that lean month of February the school rose in revolt. In a tirade against the alarming decline in the percentage of scholastic marks the head master, flinging all caution to the winds, had terminated with these incendiary words:
"I know what the trouble is, and I'll tell you. The trouble with you boys is Inordinate and Immoderate Eating. The trouble with you boys is—You Eat Too Much!"
Such a groan as went up! To comprehend the monstrosity of the accusation it is not sufficient to have been a boy; one must have retained the memory of the sharp pains and gnawing appetites of those growing days! Four hundred-odd famished forms, just from breakfast, suddenly galvanised by that unmerited blow, roared forth a unanimous indignant:
"What!"
"Eat too much!"—they could hardly believe their ears. Had the head master of the school, with years of personal experience, actually, in his sober mind, proclaimed that they ate too much! The words had been said; the accusation had to stand. And such a time to proclaim it—in the month of sliced bananas and canned vegetables! The protest that rumbled and growled in the under-form houses exploded in the Dickinson.
It so happened that for days there had been a dull grumbling about the monotony of the daily meals and the regularity and frequency of the appearance of certain abhorrent dishes, known as "scrag-birds and sinkers." "Scrag-bird" was a generic term, allowing a wide latitude for conjecture, but "sinker" was an opprobrious epithet dedicated to a particularly hard, doughy substance that under more favourable auspices sometimes, without fear of contradiction, achieves the name of "dumpling."
The "sinker" was, undoubtedly, the deadliest enemy of the growing boy—the most persistent, the most malignant. It knew no laws and it defied all restraint. It languished in the spring, but thrived and multiplied amazingly in the canned, winter term. It was as likely to bob up in a swimming dish of boiled chicken as it was certain to accompany a mutton stew. It associated at times with veal and attached itself to corned beef; it concealed itself in a beefsteak pie and clung to a leg of lamb. What the red rag is to the bull, the pudgy white of the "sinker" was to the boys, who, in a sort of desperate hope of exterminating the species, never allowed one to return intact to the kitchen. Twice a week was the allotted appearance of the "sinker"; at a third visit grumbling would break out; at a fourth arose threats of leaving for Andover or Exeter, of writing home, of boycotting the luncheon.
Now, it so happened that during the preceding week the "sinker" had inflicted itself not four, but actually six, times on that community of aching voids. The brutal accusation of the head master was the spark to the powder. The revolt assumed head and form during the day, and a call for a meeting of protest was unanimously made for that very night.
The boys met with the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, resolved to defend their liberties and assert their independence. The inevitable Doc Macnooder was to address the meeting. He spoke naturally, fluently, with great sounding phrases, on any occasion, on any topic, for his own pure delight, and he always continued to speak until violently suppressed.
"Fellows," he began, without apologies to history—"we are met to decide once and for all whether we are a free governing body, to ask ourselves what is all this worth? For weeks we have endured, supinely on our backs, the tyranny of Mrs. Van Asterbilt, the matron of this House. We have, I say, supinely permitted each insult to pass unchallenged. But the hour has struck, the worm has turned, the moment has come and, without the slightest hesitation, I ask you ... I ask you ... what do I ask you?" he paused, and appealed for enlightenment.