Mr. William Gibson, of Broadwood Academy, really deserves no place in this narrative, yet I hardly see how we can keep him out inasmuch as his trip to Yardley that Saturday afternoon proved to be the first link in a chain of events involving many of the principal actors in our little drama. For if Gibson had not come to Yardley he would not have been ignominiously imprisoned in the telephone booth, and if he had not been shut up in the booth he would not have run across Charles Cotton, and――but I am getting ahead of the story.