“Do you fellows really mean it?” asked Small doubtfully.
“We do,” answered Lanny. “Are you with us?”
Small’s eyes grew very big and round with contemplation of the awfulness of what he was pledging himself to, but he answered promptly, even if his voice shook a little, “Yes!”
“Good!” said Bert. “Now let’s go back to the house and draw up a proclamation. We must do this thing right, you know.”
When, an hour later, darkness drove the House Team from the rink and they came stamping into the hall the proclamation, imposingly inscribed on a sheet of cardboard, confronted them from the mantel. It was George Waters who first saw it and, having perused the first paragraph, broke into a laugh.
“Hi, fellows! Come over here!” he called. “Read this. It’s killing!”
The others gathered around in front of the fireplace and this is what they read:
PROCLAMATION!
Know all men by these Presents that we, the Junior Grade members of this Academy, in solemn conclave gathered, hereby declare and resolve that all men are created free and equal; that the custom of shacking so long extant in this institution is unjust, unwise and degrading; that said custom or practice is a base survival of an undemocratic custom pertaining to the educational institutions of Great Britain, whose yoke we so gloriously renounced in 1776; that hereafter shacking shall be abolished in this school.