“Excellent. Please take the unseen translations over to my house after school, and I will look them over myself. It isn’t fair to give you all the work.”
“Yes, sir,” said Maddox.
The Head still lingered by Maddox’s desk, in a rather beastly fashion, and peered (he was a little short-sighted) at Maddox’s shorthand notes.
“And what are those cabalistic symbols?” he asked.
“Just notes I took in shorthand of the fellows’ translations, sir,” he answered.
“Ha! I shall like to compare these with the unseen. Write them out for me, Maddox, will you, and bring them over to me. And this?”
He took up the volume of Bohn’s translation which Maddox had been reading out of.
“It’s a Bohn, sir,” said Maddox. “I brought it in myself. I hadn’t time to learn up the lesson, and I thought I’d better have a crib by me.”
The Head, so thought the eager audience, looked rather stern for a moment. Then, quite naturally, he laughed.
“I shall confiscate that,” he said, looking pleasantly round. “Better practice for you, Maddox, to get up your lesson without one.”