Two houses in an English school fall out over a captaincy, a stolen sum and a boat race, and the quarrel runs the length of a year. Talbot Baines Reed knew his ground: he wrote for "The Boy's Own Paper" when it had half a million readers. The plot is a mechanism for putting boys in situations where honesty costs them something, and it works because the cost is always specific. Fifty-nine plates after painters including David Wilkie and James Holland carry the school story through public occasions, riverside and domestic scenes of the century.