“I hadn’t time to mug it all up,” he remarked, “and so I shall just read you through a translation out of a crib which—which came into my possession a few days ago.”
He began; read a line or two, then stopped and consulted his shorthand notes. Then he nodded to the top of the form.
“Just the expression you used,” he said genially.
He went on a little farther.
“I think that is how you translated it, Plugs—I mean, Gregson,” he observed to the second boy.
This was not quite comfortable, and uneasy glances passed about. Who could possibly have expected that Maddox would bring a crib into form? There was a really distressing parallelism between it and the renderings given by most of the boys, and in consequence there were pensive faces. But Maddox made no further comment, and proceeded to ask a few questions about grammar.
“And now,” he said, “you will turn on a hundred lines farther and translate on paper the twelve lines beginning at line 236. You will use no books at all for this, neither dictionaries nor—nor any other.”
There was a quarter of an hour’s silence, broken only by the scratchings of labouring pens. The unlucky Gregson, who had been positively brilliant over the prepared lines, could make neither head nor tail of the fairly elementary passage that Maddox had set, and ventured on a protest.
“I say, Mr. Tovey never gives us unseens,” he said.
“I dare say; but I do,” remarked Maddox.