After two of the school's silver sports trophies ('pots' in contemporary slang) are stolen in a burglary, the boys, their masters, and the police join in the hunt for the 'pots'.

Tony Graham, of the Sixth form at St Austin's, narrowly defeats his cousin Allen Thomson, of Rugby, in boxing at the inter-school sports at Aldershot.

Tony's fag Robinson excitedly tells them that a window pane was removed from the Pavilion, where the school sports trophies are temporarily being kept.

Jim tells Tony that on the night of the burglary, he broke into the Pavilion because he had left notes there which he needed to study for an examination.

Welch shares a study with Charteris, who runs an unofficial school magazine, The Glow Worm.

Another student, Barrett, trespasses on the land of Sir Alfred Venner to collect bird eggs.

Roberts tells Thompson that the culprit was not a professional, since the window pane was not cut neatly.

The Headmaster fears Jim ran away as a result of being accused of the burglary, and has Mr Merevale and other housemasters send their prefects to search for him.

Barrett decides to admit that he saw the trophies, but changes his mind when he sees they have been returned and awarded to Welch.

Charteris and his friends stay up late to finish the special issue of The Glow Worm.

[2] The serial commenced in January 1902 and the second part appeared in the February 1902 issue, but when the magazine ceased publication in March that year, the remainder of the plot was summarised at the end of the third part of the serial, in the form of a letter from one of the characters, Jim Thomson, to his brother Allen.

The master copy—on paper—was placed face down in a pan whose bottom was covered in a special gelatin, to which the pigment was transferred as a mirror image.

Although a reasonably simple, if slow, method, the copy produced had text (and figures) in a pale coloured ink that was hard to read.

In chapter 11, one of the characters quotes a Latin phrase (attributing it to Thucydides): This is a joke: Thucydides wrote in Greek, not Latin (as Wodehouse would have expected the reader to know) and the quoted phrase is in fact a mixture of lines from Ovid and Virgil.