The story opens in a rather run-down school. There is an unfortunate incident in which a boy is almost killed, and a boy of the name of Jeffreys, not a very popular chap, is held to have been responsible.

Thus the dog acquires a bad name. Throughout the next few years of Jeffreys’ life this incident is brought up against him. He is brought lower and lower, till eventually he finds somewhere to live in the utmost poverty, amongst the very poor. Here by a twist of fortune he ends up looking after some abandoned children. There is a fire, and he rescues somebody, but it is only when he gets that person back to his room that he realises it is the very person whom he had almost killed all those years before.

This book is very well written. I have been wondering whether it is a book for teenagers, or a book for adults, and have come to the conclusion that it’s for teenagers, but only the really bright ones, as there is so much food for thought in it.

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