Having now read all of this author's books about school life--rather dated even to me--I feel that this book is the one I have enjoyed the most. It was not published as a book until seven or eight years after the author's death, but that was because the book had been published in serialised form in the Boy’s Own Paper.

While the original text looked quite nice it suffered from having been typeset either by an apprentice or by someone rather eccentric. For example words with an apostrophe representing the “o” of “not” had the apostrophe consistently in the wrong place, for example “would’nt” instead of “wouldn’t”. We have very carefully cleaned up this class of error, and hope no more are to be found.

We have heard the audiobook, and it is good.

The main heroes of the story are all lovable gentle little chaps, but dreadful things happen, like a boat they have used goes missing, and a folding pencil one of them desperately desires in the stationer’s shop goes missing from the shop. Thus throughout the book there is a constant tension as to whether the police will be called, and eventually one of the boys sends for his father to help sort matters out, as they had got far beyond his own ability to deal with things.

REED, Talbot Baines (1852-93). English author of books for boys, born in London, the son of Sir Charles Reed (1819-91), chairman of the London School Board. He became head of his father's firm of typefounders, and wrote books on the history of printing (such as History of the Old English Letter-foundries (1887). His robust, moral, but entertaining school stories first appeared in the Boy's Own Paper. They include The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's (1881), The Master of the Shell (1887), and Cockhouse at Fellsgarth (1891).

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk