“What was that last, Frank?” he said. “It sounded jolly beastly, but I wasn’t attending.”
Frank repeated it, and David squealed as he drew his bed-clothes up to his chin.
“I think that’s enough,” he said. “I shall have gory nightmares. Oh, hasn’t it been a jolly day?”
“Ripping. Good night, David.”
“Good night. What a pity it can’t be this morning again.”
Frank lay long awake that night. Before he slept he slid out of bed and followed David’s example.
CHAPTER XI
David, with the tip of his tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth, was engaged in the delicate, and apparently (until you know the reason) meaningless task of lashing two pens together with a piece of cotton, so that their respective nibs should be fixed at a particular distance apart from each other. The distance, as he took pains to measure accurately, was exactly that between the first and fourth line on a piece of scribbling paper. If this is neatly done—and David with his deft fingers was doing it very neatly indeed—it will be clear that, if both pens are dipped in ink, and one writes certain words along the first line of the paper, the second pen, duly adjusted, will simultaneously be writing the same words along the fourth line. Similarly, when the first pen is engaged in the second line, the other will be engaged on the fifth. Thus, provided the pens are securely lashed and behave reasonably, a sheet of scribbling paper of the sort that holds twenty lines can be filled with hexameters from any given part of the highly over-rated adventures of the pious Æneas in the time that, without this contrivance, it would take to transcribe ten of those lines. Any boy, moreover, and such adults as still preserve a brain of moderate ingenuity, will easily guess why those pens, in David’s very superior contraption, were lashed together at a distance of three lines, for were they lashed together at the distance of one or even two lines apart, this engaging scheme by which two lines were written simultaneously would be much more easily detected. As David had to write out no fewer than five hundred lines of this piffling “Æneid,” he thus hoped to be quit of his task in the time that it would take a less ingenious devil to write two hundred and fifty.
It was already getting dark at the close of a half-holiday afternoon towards the end of February, and Bags, while David was engaged in these preparatory processes, was making tea for them both in the study they shared together. It was a considerably larger one than that which they had inhabited during their first year, but David’s belongings seemed to have grown proportionately to his own limbs, and they still usurped by far the greater portion of the available room. His task, though tiresome, was not one that required much concentration of attention; it was mere dull transcribing work, and he could quite well converse as it was going on. Besides, it was a very short time since he had copied out these same pages before; he had a certain familiarity with them.