“I like that! Who does both your Picciolas?”
“French don’t count. It’s time you began to work for your giddy livin’ an’ help us. You aren’t goin’ up for anythin’ that matters. Play for your side, as Heffles says, or die the death! You don’t want to die the death, again, do you? Now, let’s hear about that stinkard Johnson swottin’ Dutch. You’re sure it was Sammivel, not Binjamin? You are so dam’ inaccurate!”
Beetle conducted an attentive class on the curiosities of literature for nearly a quarter of an hour. As Stalky pointed out, he promised to be useful.
The Horace Ode next morning ran well; and King was content. Then, in full feather, he sailed round the firmament at large, and, somehow, apropos to something or other, used the word “della Cruscan”—“if any of you have the faintest idea of its origin.” Some one hadn’t caught it correctly; which gave Beetle just time to whisper “Bran—an’ mills,” to Howell, who said promptly: “Hasn’t it somethin’ to do with mills—an’ bran, sir?” King cast himself into poses of stricken wonder. “Oddly enough,” said he, “it has.”
They were then told a great deal about some silly Italian Academy of Letters which borrowed its office furniture from the equipment of mediæval flour-mills. And: “How has our Ap-Howell come by his knowledge?” Howell, being, indeed, Welsh, thought that it might have been something he had read in the holidays. King openly purred over him.
“If that had been me,” Beetle observed while they were toying with sardines between lessons, “he’d ha’ dropped on me for showin’-off.”
“See what we’re savin’ you from,” Stalky answered. “I’m playin’ Johnson, ’member, this afternoon.”
That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion how he had come by the fact.
“Why didn’t you say your father told you?” Beetle asked at tea.