"Please, sir, I thought I had done more than that." And he looks at it on all sides, turns it to the right, to the left, upside down; he reads it forwards, he reads it backwards. No use; he can't make it out.
All at once, however, he will remember that he had a bad headache last night, or maybe a bilious attack.
[ The ] bilious attack is to the English schoolboy what the migraine is to the dear ladies of France: a good maid-of-all-work.
Sometimes my young hero brings no exercise at all. It has slipped, in the train, from the book in which he had carefully placed it, or there is a crack in his locker, and the paper slipped through. You order excavations to be made, and the exercise has vanished like magic. Johnny wonders.
"Perhaps the mice ate it!" you are wicked enough to suggest.
This makes him smile and blush. He generally collapses before a remark like this.
But if he has a good excuse, behold him!
"I could not do my exercise last night," said to me one day a young Briton. It was evident from his self-satisfied and confident assurance that he had a good answer ready for my inquiry.