The entire informality of these proceedings, the absence of the sense that they were being taught and had got to learn, disarmed the boys, and before this stanza was reached the fact that it was the portentous Head who was reading to them had quite vanished. They were all sitting or lying about at ease on the grass, one or two of them listening intently, the others, for the most part, feeling just lazy and soothed and comfortable. But among the intent listeners was David, and as the Head paused and repeated “alien corn,” he rolled over on to his back, absorbed and lost. “Golly,” he said quietly to himself. “Oh Golly!” Then he became aware that he had spoken aloud, but scarcely wondered whether the Head had heard or not, so completely did the magic of the words possess him. And in some mysterious way they added to his store of happiness: they became part of him, and thus part of the fact that he was going to Marchester next week, and would see Hughes, that there was a half-holiday this afternoon, that he was in the eleven. Keats’s poem was part of the whole joy of life, it, and its music, and the sense of longing for something he did not know about, which it produced in him. Then his attention was completely diverted by the feeling of a slight vibration in his trouser-pocket, caused by the movements of the Monarch and his wife who were there in their travelling-carriage, and, now that he recollected them, became part of the beneficent joy of things in general. So for fear of their not getting their proper share of the oxygen of the world, he withdrew the box from his pocket, laid it on the grass, and forgot about them again, in hearing of the “foam of perilous seas.” The Head finished the Ode, and invited questions. Stone wanted to know what Hippocrene was, thinking this an intelligent question, but Ferrers’s inquiry as to what the “magic casements” were earned stronger approbation from the Head, who mysteriously told him that no one could tell till they looked out on to the “perilous seas.” It was not like the “Commentaries” of Julius Cæsar, this which he had read them, because it could mean different things to different people. Each sentence of the “Commentaries” meant one thing and it was the business of boys to find out, with the aid of a dictionary, what it was. But music and poetry were altogether different: they meant to you what you were capable of finding in them. Then he turned to David, who alone of the class had not asked any questions, intelligent or otherwise. “Nothing you want to know, Blaize?” he asked. “No, thank you, sir,” said David. “But would you read it us again, sir, as you do sometimes?”