| abstract | - The girls are now in their third year at Cackle's Academy. Miss Bat has left and Miss Crotchet is the new Chanting teacher. Mildred and her friends are singing and dancing in one of the classrooms. Miss Drill walks in and doesn't stop them, but then Miss Hardbroom shows up and tells everybody off. Miss Drill is fed up of Miss Hardbroom treating her like one of the pupils and threatens to resign, and go work at the adventure center with her boyfriend. Miss Hardbroom, on the other hand, complains to Miss Cackle about Mildred and and her friends. Miss Cackle suggests that Mildred and her friends should join the Cauldron Club as something for them to do in their spare time. Miss Hardbroom balks at the idea, but promises to discuss it with the current head Cauldronite, Ethel Hallow. Ethel feels the same way as Miss Hardbroom about the whole thing, but they decide that Mildred and and her friends should pass the initiation test. Mildred, Maud, Enid, Jadu and Ruby get some pointers from Fenella and Griselda, and go to Ethel's initiation meeting. They have to climb a ladder, blindfolded, get a pebble and drop in into a steaming cauldron below. The trick is that they have to conjure a life-like image in the smoke in the process. Ethel's sure that none of them will know the proper spell for it, but is very disappointed to discover that they do. As Mildred nears finishing, Ethel casts a spell on Mildred's pebble, making it slip out of her hand. Meanwhile, Miss Cackle force s Miss Hardbroom to apologize to Miss Drill. No sooner has Miss Drill accepted her apology, than she overhears Miss Hardbroom say how useless it is to have a non-witch at a witch school. Miss Drill and Mildred meet up outside the school, and Miss Drill tries to convince Mildred to stick around and fight the good fight and persevere. In the process, she convinces herself. Fenella and Griselda then show Mildred and her friends a secret room under the library, and they decide to form a club of their own called the Dangerous Old Books Society (DOBS). Ethel's quite put out that Mildred's friends all failed to show up for her Cauldron Club meeting "Well, this is a fine start! That's dedication for you!" and badgers Sybil into telling her where they disappeared to. She finds them partying to the music of a magic grammaphone and turns up the volume so that Miss Hardbroom can hear it. Miss Cackle decides to allow the girls to keep DOBS up and running, provided it is supervised by a teacher, which Miss Drill volunteers for.
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