Extract: CHAPTER I. THE MILITARY ACADEMY. "Well, now, I am disgusted." "So am I. I call it a most unusual proceeding." "That is a very mild term to be applied to it. I call it an outrage. The Professor has deliberately gone to work to disgrace the school and every student in it." "That's my opinion. I shall give my father a full history of the case in the next letter I write to him; and I incline to the belief that he will order me to pack my trunk and start for home." "I know that is what my father will do. Why, fellows, just think of it for a moment! What if this street gamin, who has been brought here as the Professor's pet, should accidentally win a warrant at the next examination?" "Or a commission! That would be worse yet. Wouldn't a gentleman's son look nice obeying his orders-the orders of a bootblack?" "I'll never do that. I'll stay in the guard-house until I am gray-headed first." "Well, I won't. I'll go home first." This conversation took place one cold, frosty morning in the latter part of January, 18-, among the members of a little party of boys who were walking up the path that led to the door of the Bridgeport Military Academy. There were a dozen of them in all, and their ages varied from thirteen to sixteen years. They looked like young soldiers, dressed as they were in their neat, well-fitting uniforms of cadet gray, set off by light blue trimmings; but it seems that they were anything but good soldiers just then, for their words indicated a determination on their part to rebel against lawful authority.... Biography Charles Austin Fosdick (September 6, 1842 - August 22, 1915), better known by his nom de plume Harry Castlemon, was a prolific writer of juvenile stories and novels, intended mainly for boys. He was born in Randolph, New York, and received a high school diploma from Central High School in Buffalo, New York. He served in the Union Navy from 1862 to 1865, during the American Civil War, acting as the receiver and superintendent of coal for the Mississippi River Squadron. Fosdick had begun to write as a teenager, and drew on his experiences serving in the Navy in such early novels as Frank on a Gunboat (1864) and Frank on the Lower Mississippi (1867). He soon became the most-read author for boys in the post-Civil War era, the golden age of children's literature. Fosdick once remarked that: "Boys don't like fine literature. What they want is adventure, and the more of it you can get in two-hundred-fifty pages of manuscript, the better fellow you are." Fosdick served up a lot of adventure in such popular book series as the Gunboat Series, the Rocky Mountain