“Ah, your Latin exercise I thought was very fair in parts to-day.”
Stephen stared at his master, and the master looked very pleasantly at Stephen.
“I copied it off Raddleston,” said the boy, in a trembling voice, and mentally resigning himself to his fate.
“Ah!” said Mr Rastle, laughing; “it’s a funny thing, now, Greenfield, I knew that myself. No two boys could possibly have translated ‘nobody’ into ‘nullus corpus’ without making common cause!”
Stephen was desperately perplexed. He had expected a regular row on the head of his confession, and here was his master cracking jokes about the affair!
“I’m very sorry I did it. I won’t do it again,” said he. “That’s right, my boy; Raddleston isn’t infallible. Much better do it yourself. I venture to say, now, you can tell me what the Latin for ‘nobody’ is without a dictionary.”
“Nemo,” promptly replied Stephen.
“Of course! and therefore if you had done the exercise yourself you wouldn’t have made that horrid—that fearful mistake!”
Stephen said, “Yes, sir,” and meditated.
“Come now,” said Mr Rastle, cheerily, “I’m not going to scold you. But if you take my advice you will try and do the next exercise by yourself. Of course you can’t expect to be perfect all at once, but if you always copy off Raddleston, do you see, you’ll never get on at all.”