The classroom is much the same (they all are) as the one to which I introduced you before breakfast. The master, younger, square-jawed, not intellectual but grim, rather sour: the face is more remarkable for an absence of any virtue than for any special presence of vice. He gives the boys three minutes in which to make sure of their work: then they are all marched out into the middle of the room, asked questions rapidly on the Greek irregular verbs; a boy goes down a place; another supplants him; the whole system is apparently to keep the body moving so that the brain may perhaps capture some motion and become alert; rather does it seem to any rational, unprejudiced bystander a method to involve wasting a maximum amount of time for a minimum amount of actual good. These boys are most certainly no more alert than they were in early school: they do not crib here, or write notes to each other or read Mr. Nat Gould, they are far too frightened for that; they are terrorized like a rabbit in front of a gigantic snake, fascinated, almost loving, certainly admiring the strength of a man who has such power. He is not inhuman either, this master, he has a stock of jokes, each of which is carefully stowed into a particular compartment of his brain, brought out in a particular order and calling for the same amount of quiet laughter every time. He is very popular among the boys and in existing conditions perhaps deserves to be. When you are being slave-driven, you at least like your driver to be simple, honest and modelled on a plan you can understand: he has to beat you, he is paid for it; if he can afford to throw you a joke, however old and threadbare, yet like a bone thrown to a pariah dog in the street, you relish it all the more, for you know it is more than your due. This man achieves very excellent results in all examinations: he is known as the best teacher of grammar in the school. He is the "thorough" man who will make his way and become a leading Head Master in the end. He has no sympathy, no intellectual insight, he has been bred on the same plan that he is now inculcating and thinks it the finest system ever devised for the education of boys: in fact the only system. He knows that several ignorant authors, journalists and politicians occasionally decry the results of his teaching, but he is aloof, superior to all these "common cries of curs"; more aristocratic even than Coriolanus, his downfall in the next decade will be as it was with the aristocrats in the French Revolution, really terrible to witness. It is with a sigh of relief that the Modern Shell hear the bell that rings the close of this hour. Immediately following on this, the form splits up into sets for mathematics, a subject in which they never make much progress for several reasons.