Potter’s season ticket which was stolen with the money was returned to him this morning by the Railway Company as having been found. Father went up and saw them and they said that the ticket was sent to them by Mr Dams, the Minor Canon; it turns out, for Father went and saw him this evening, that it was dropped by the thief into his letter-box at the Choir School. It is certainly very curious and would seem to point to somebody outside the School. But of course we are no further forward.
The birds arrived after Hall and prevented me going up to watch a House Game of which secretly I was not ill-pleased. The birds were lashed on to planks and caused much interest to such of the School as were about. Barrington-Ward, Low, Wood and myself received them and superintended the placing of them in the Old Lecture Room. It took us from 2 o’clock until after 3.30, I had to tell Forbes I should be late. The cases are so large that they required some manipulation to get up the stairs. We put up a notice informing the too curious that ‘no one was allowed into the Old Lecture Room at present without leave’ and slammed the door in their faces.
In Prep tonight Whitmore brought me a brute of a sum to show him how to do it. No one has any right to ‘send a boy to buy a shillings worth of eggs’, especially when ‘he breaks 3 and therefore his master has to pay at the rate of 1d on each of the market price of 5 eggs’. To find how many eggs he bought for a shilling’ is, let us hope, a pleasure for a mathematician, I got as far a ‘let x=number of eggs’ which I knew to be quite safe, I then struggled for nearly 25 minutes and had to own myself beat but took it in to Hobson who also gave up the unequal struggle and going round the Dormitories I had to own that we were beaten and we would never know how many eggs the merchant had got for his shilling. I hope they were bad!!
Tomorrow I shall be nineteen. Well-a-day! It’s a great age.
