examination; and Harrington, who knew the meaning of the word "incentive," hoped it was a half-holiday.

The superintendent caressed his chin and explained that he meant a ticket for good deportment-a good-ticket-to be presented on the last day of each month to the best boy in the class, and he felt sure such a wellconsidered step would have an effect approximate to what was desired.

The class were dazed. The sequence of the superintendent's ideas bewildered them. They couldn't—not even Harrington-see the connection between their recent behavior and a good-ticket. They filed out to recess, a singularly unresponsive aggregation with seeds of ferment in their souls. They were outraged by this senseless supposition that any one of them was urgently in need of a good-ticket. What had they done to deserve such a thing? They were a moderately "bad" class. It was an arbitrary act! For the first time a poignant regret arose that the class did not include girls. They could have been depended upon to take it.

In the yard a group gathered, and the general attitude was that each individual in the following month was going to be so surpassingly wicked as to triumphantly avoid the ignominy of the good-ticket. It took a logician like Harrington to point out that, since there was to be a goodticket, somebody would have to get it. No matter how bad they were, someone would be least worst. The way to arrange it, he explained, was to pick out one person to be awfully good. As the group apparently included everyone in the class, this remark was felt to be personal. Harrington saw the eye of Teddy Cavannagh coldly fixed upon him. Teddy was notoriously a fighter. He was Harrington's one rival.

"Who was you meaning?" said Teddy, puffing out his chest.

Harrington did not trouble to reply. He merely

glanced over his shoulder. Every neck craned in the direction his eyes had taken. Harrington had remembered what the rest had forgotten. There was a member of the class the group did not include. At the moment he was engaged in saying good afternoon to the pretty principal. It was not astonishing that they had forgotten Sammy. He was a negative person, the only salient point in his character being a ridiculous desire to do as he was told. But he had been known to bring flowers to his teacher, and to covet high marks in geography.

Harrington looked at Sammy. The class looked at Sammy; and then, in silent worship at Harrington. Very little explanation was necessary, only Harrington impressed it solemnly upon their minds that the word "good-ticket" was not to be spoken to Sammy. The sentiment was unanimous that it would not encourage Sammy along his road of virtue, for though he possessed germs of morality he was no fanatic.

Never was a neophyte guarded and guided with such unremitting solicitude as this unconscious aspirant for moral honors. From the moment they saw that oblong, pink abomination, covered with scrawls. and flourishes, with "Reward of Merit" glaring in the midst, they knew, each boy, that who carried it home in his hand on the

in class. They purloined delicacies for his luncheon. If he wanted anything they rushed to get it. They answered him kindly when he desired to quarrel, and when, complaisant from much pampering, he became unendurable, they remembered the good-ticket and refrained from punching him.

While they enmeshed Sammy in the toils of propriety, they rose so superior to their ordinary "badness" that the pretty principal wrinkled her forehead in despair over the extraordinary problem education presented. The goodness of Sammy she

the case, was elate with the success of his diplomacy,and perhaps a little unnecessarily puffed up about it. Pronounced characters like Teddy Cavannagh resented this attitude, which made nothing of the part the class had played and absurdly exalted the brain and "badness "of Harrington Symms.

Thus matters stood when a mild attack of measles removed Harrington's hand from the helm of affairs, and the class immediately perceived how much of its inspiration had been Harrington. They had been so uproariously wicked those first two weeks that they had exhausted their own invention

and, deprived of Harrington's imagination to draw upon, were somewhat at a loss. Also Sammy, peevish from much petting, involved himself in an altercation with a smaller boy, whom he kicked, and was subsequently kept after school by a righteously disgusted teacher. At this panic fell upon the class. They lost sight of the good of the whole, and instead of rallying to the restoration of Sammy's integrity, each for himself became promptly as insubordinate as his ingenuity permitted. They were determined that Harrington should not find them wanting. They prepared an ovation to welcome his return. They awaited him at the school-gate, half a dozen of the favored of his associates, as he came up the street that Monday morning. They hailed him from afar.

"Ha-a-ary!" "Say, Simmy!"

They surrounded him, and he looked at them a trifle remotely. "I've been awful sick!" he proclaimed impressively.

They looked so humiliated at their own robustness that Harrington unbent, and detailed the thrilling symptoms of his disease. They listened with a vague feeling of disappointment. "But you're all right now, ain't you, Simmy ?" Christy Quinn wanted to know. Harrington looked dubious. "Cause there's something" Christy hesitated. Cold fear flowed over Harrington. Had anything happened to Sammy?

"'Cause we thought we'd all make a sneak on old Cullom's pears this afternoon," said Christy with an effort at off-handedness. It fell flat under Harrington's cold regard. "Don't yer think it would be fun ?" Christy faltered.

"I guess it would be all right for you," said Harrington condescendingly. "My

knees are awful wobbly yet. I guess you don't know what it is to be sick." He swaggered away across the yard with the pleasing sense of being interesting and misunderstood. The pear proposition seemed frivolous to him. When the assailants of "old Cullom's" orchard were led around by the ear that afternoon by the outraged owner of the fruit and presented to an equally outraged teacher, Harrington consoled them by assuring them that, had he been with them, they would not have been caught, a statement the more enraging from its verity. He almost wished that he had gone with them in order to show them how clumsily they had managed it; but measles had left langour in their wake. He was not well, and active worldly evil had, for the moment, lost its savor.

good-ticket pass into Sammy's keeping put new life into him. He even flung out a little jest as to the chance of Teddy Cavannagh getting it, carefully within Teddy's hearing. Teddy, whose temper had suffered severely from Harrington's recent behavior, received the suggestion belligerently.

"Yer think yer the only bad 'un, do yer?" he shouted, and squared off from Harrington Symms.

It was pleasanter to sit apart in convalesence, and, occasionally reaching a metaphorical finger into the broth, by a well-planted criticism or disparagement, as in the case of the pears, stir his faction to boiling pitch. The fact that the vice-principal always aimed her punishment at the result, and never perceived the cause, increased his scorn for her acuteness. Indeed she rather singled out Harrington for small attentions, which he graciously tolerated because the vice-principal seemed the only person who at all appreciated how extremely ill he had been. But he wished her perception of good and evil was a little keener. Though there was much to be desired in Sammy's behavior, there was so much more in everyone else's that Harrington knew, to a healthy eye, the proposition was a clear one.

But

he had a lurking apprehension that such a foggy differentiation as the vice-principal's might become confused between Sammy's worst goodness and the class's worst badness. And not one boy in the class had courage to tell him of Sammy's defalcation. The last week of the month dragged heavily. On the final afternoon Harrington entered the school-yard with a feeling of immense relief. The idea of seeing the

They met. They clinched. There was a tussle-a thud. A cloud of dust arose. A crowd of boys closed in. Then a horrified voice proceeded from the school-room door.

"Boys!" The bell pealed under an emphatic hand.

Teddy rebounded like a rubber ball from his prostrate foe, and slowly, limb by limb, Harrington picked himself out of the dust. He was pale, and very shaky. He felt the viceprincipal brushing the dust from his clothes. He was too dazed with rage to resent it.

"I am ashamed of you!" the vice-principal was saying. "What can make you behave like this!" She was looking at Teddy. She was flushed. Her voice trembled.

Harrington slouched into school with the heart of a ruffian under his tousled jacket. The day was warm. The recitation droned. Harrington's head ached monotonously where the school-yard had met it. He leaned his elbows on his desk and stared at the back of Teddy Cavannagh's head. It had an exasperating cock. Harrington's fingers itched to aim a brick at it. He revolved vague schemes of revenge. watched the hands of the clock. As they drew near the hour of three he grew restless, excited. His eyes were on the school-room door.

He

At fifteen minutes of three the superintendent came in. The class straightened up with a thrill, and each glanced apprehensively at his neighbor. They watched the superintendent's back as he stood listening while the vice-principal murmured to him interminably, and suspense tightened. Just as it seemed to reach snapping-point