Harry Potter and the Philosopher's / Sorcerer's Stone Read Along

In PoA, Harry leaves his cloak in the tunnel from Honeydukes when he’s racing Malfoy back to the castle after he sees Harry’s head at the Shrieking Shack. He also leaves it at the foot of the whomping willow when following Sirius and Ron into the tunnel; that’s why Snape was able to sneak into the SS without them seeing him. Harry really is very careless with his cloak. Granted he doesn’t know it’s a Deathly Hallow, but you would think he’d take better care because it belonged to his father, or even just because it’s a very cool and useful thing to have. If he ever did truly lose it he would be sorry for being so careless.

Concerning the troll in the dungeon, I can only see two possibilities—either the same one was in there all year, or someone had to keep going down there and switching them out…how often? Neither of those sounds very practical.

I suppose Snape could have set the potion bottles so that they can’t be rearranged and would magically refill if emptied. But why would he even bother to do that? How many people did they expect to go through there?

Julia, I agree that Harry and Hermione were pretty reckless about drinking potions following an untrustworthy person.

Shepherdess wrote:But why would he even bother to do that? How many people did they expect to go through there?

They had to at least provide for the situation where a thief had already got in - they had to be able to go after him all the way through.

At the end of OoP I found this quote from the trip home:

"When the ticket inspector signalled to Harry, Ron and Hermione that it was safe to walk through the magical barrier between platforms nine and ten...."

So there is a ticket inspector and I would assume that he does inspect tickets. That eliminates the idea that tickets are magically "read" somehow.

Of course, it doesn't tell us anything about whether you need a new ticket each year or just one for all the years you go to school.