John Humperdink Stover, otherwise known as "The Varmint," for his pestiferousness, or as "Dink" when in special favor, was expelled from a boarding school and sent to Lawrenceville Academy. On the stage on the way to the school he meets a somewhat silent man whom "Dink" sizes up for a salesman and he proceeds to wax eloquent on the subject of his past career and the reason why he was expelled from his previous school. The "salesman" is no other than the professor of Latin, known to the boys as the "Roman." "Dink" boasts that in a week he will have the boys at the school in his power. A strange uneasiness grips him when he sees that he does not make just the impression he expected. Little by little he succeeds in making himself the most thoroughly disliked and abhorred person on the campus.