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 [!-- Illustration - THE ACADEMY BAND --] appeared a complete success; but at last all was discovered.
THE ACADEMY BAND.
The boys one evening began imprudently to play at “tossing in the blanket” before they were undressed. The rattle sounded, and they had just time to hide away the blanket. But the doctor coming in, and finding they were only then beginning to undress, knew they must have been at some mischief, and began questioning one after another. Unluckily, while he was in the room the rattle sounded again by accident; perhaps the boy in the room below had pulled the string by moving in bed. The doctor looked about, found the rattle hanging just below the window, saw the string, opened the window and traced its course outside, went down into the room below, and understood the whole arrangement. Then he put the rattle in his pocket and went away without saying a word. The boys declared he had such difficulty in keeping himself from laughing that he was afraid to speak lest he should burst out.
However, next day every boy in that room had a slight punishment, and so the matter ended.
Now I will tell you another of Uncle John’s pranks at school. There was a large tree in the playground, the upper branches of which spread out very near to the windows of the bedroom I have been describing. One evening Uncle John got hold of a large hand-bell which was used for ringing the boys up in the morning; and climbing up the tree, he fastened it by a piece of string to a branch near the top. Then another boy threw him the end of a long string from a window of the bedroom into the tree, and he fastened it to the bell in such a way that when it was pulled in the bedroom it made the bell ring in the tree. Having accomplished this arrangement, he came down from the tree and went to bed.
At ten o’clock at night the household was disturbed by the loud ringing of this bell. The master, in his dressing-gown, came out into the playground, and soon discovered where the sound came from, but of course supposed that some boy had climbed up into the tree, and was ringing the bell there. It was the middle of summer, and a beautiful moonlight night, so the boys could see from the windows all that took place. Dr. Birchall stood at the foot of the tree, looking up, and exclaimed, angrily,
“Come down, you naughty boy! Come down, I say, directly! Oh, I’ll give you such a flogging! Stop that horrible noise, I tell you, and come down!”