Heinricy was one of the tall rascals who gave themselves no trouble over anything. He shoved the knife he had been playing with into his pocket, and got up noisily, with his lower lip hanging, and coughing in a gruff voice. Nobody was pleased to have him called up after the gentle Perlemann. The pupils sat drowsing in the warm room, some of them half asleep, soothed by the purring sound of the gas. They were all tired after the holiday; they had all crawled out of warm beds that morning with their teeth chattering, groaning in spirit. And they would have preferred to have the gentle Perlemann drone on for the remainder of the period. Heinricy was almost sure to make trouble. “I wasn’t here when we had this,” he said, none too respectfully. Herr Ballerstedt puffed himself up, waved his fist, struggled to speak, and stared young Heinricy in the face with his eyebrows raised. His head shook with the effort he made; but he finally managed to bring out a “Well!” and the spell was broken. He went on with perfect fluency. “There is never any work to be got out of you, and you always have an excuse ready, Heinricy. If you were ill the last time, you could have had help in that part; besides, if the first part dealt with the condition before the tribulation, and the second part with the tribulation itself, you could have told by counting on your fingers that the third part must deal with the condition after the tribulation! But you have no application or interest whatever; you are not only a poor creature, but you are always ready to excuse and defend your mistakes. But so long as this is the case, Heinricy, you cannot expect to make any improvement, and so I warn you. Sit down, Heinricy. Go on, Wasservogel.” Heinricy, thick-skinned and defiant, sat down with much shuffling and scraping, whispered some sort of saucy comment in his neighbour’s ear, and took out his jack-knife again. Wasservogel stood up: a boy with inflamed eyes, a snub nose, prominent ears, and bitten fingernails. He finished the summary in a rather whining voice, and began to relate the story of Job, the man from the land of Uz, and what happened to him. He had simply opened his Bible, behind the back of the pupil ahead of him; and he read from it with an air of utter innocence and concentration, staring then at a point on the wall and translated what he read, coughing the while, into awkward and hesitating modern German. There was something positively repulsive about Wasservogel; but Herr Ballerstedt gave him a large meed of praise. Wasservogel had the knack of making the masters like him; and they praised him in order to show that they were incapable of being led away by his ugliness to blame him unjustly.