Later in the day a conference between the powers hostile to Remove A was held (the powers in question being the Head, Adams, and Maddox) and a diabolical plan of campaign was hatched. The classical work of the form, hitherto presided over, blindfold, so to speak, by Mr. Tovey, was to be taken with the suddenness of a thunderstorm by Maddox. Not a word was to be said; he was simply to march in at early school next day, and open fire on his own system. The lesson was Virgil, and that evening he closely studied the excellent translation as given by Mr. Bohn in the volume he had confiscated from David. Construing began from the top of the form, and boy after boy translated with extreme elegance and fluency, and Maddox was beaming and complimentary. Among his other weird accomplishments he knew shorthand, and, screened by the sloping cover of his desk, he made an accurate transcript of what the translation of each boy had been. “Yes, very good, very good indeed,” he said when this was finished. “Quite a lot of you have got full marks.” He opened the lid of his desk, and took out of it the Virgil crib which he had confiscated from David three days before. “I hadn’t time to mug it all up,” he remarked, “and so I shall just read you through a translation out of a crib which—which came into my possession a few days ago.” He began; read a line or two, then stopped and consulted his shorthand notes. Then he nodded to the top of the form. “Just the expression you used,” he said genially. He went on a little farther. “I think that is how you translated it, Plugs—I mean, Gregson,” he observed to the second boy. This was not quite comfortable, and uneasy glances passed about. Who could possibly have expected that Maddox would bring a crib into form? There was a really distressing parallelism between it and the renderings given by most of the boys, and in consequence there were pensive faces. But Maddox made no further comment, and proceeded to ask a few questions about grammar. “And now,” he said, “you will turn on a hundred lines farther and translate on paper the twelve lines beginning at line 236. You will use no books at all for this, neither dictionaries nor—nor any other.” There was a quarter of an hour’s silence, broken only by the scratchings of labouring pens. The unlucky Gregson, who had been positively brilliant over the prepared lines, could make neither head nor tail of the fairly elementary passage that Maddox had set, and ventured on a protest. “I say, Mr. Tovey never gives us unseens,” he said. “I dare say; but I do,” remarked Maddox. Suppressed giggles: this was rather a score. “Nor do I allow laughing,” he added. Decidedly this hour was not going very comfortably, and no alleviation was possible, for it was somehow quite hopeless to think of ragging Maddox; it was also very nearly hopeless to translate this unknown passage. And then a thing far more dreadful happened than any that had gone before.