* * * * * The imposition was a matter of book-keeping, as far as Beetle was concerned; for it was his custom of rainy afternoons to fabricate store of lines in anticipation of just these accidents. They covered such English verse as interested him at the moment, and helped to fix the stuff in his memory. After tea, he drew the required amount from his drawer in Number Five Study, thrust it into his pocket, went up to the Head’s house, and settled himself in the big Outer Library where, ever since the Head had taken him off all mathematics, he did précis-work and French translation. Here he buried himself in a close-printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for some time. A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (_Curiosities of Literature_ was its name) full of the finest confused feeding--such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of _Lycidas_) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities. This evening he fell on a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known as Tom-a-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a Tom-a-Bedlam in _Lear_, but whom Beetle did not consider at all funny. Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse--of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds--from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran: With a heart of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander. With a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney, Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end-- Methinks it is no journey. He sat, mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang and it was time to take his lines up to King’s study and lay them, as hot from the press, in the impot-basket appointed. He carried his dreams on to Number Five. They knew the symptoms of old. “Readin’ again,” said Stalky, like a wife welcoming her spouse from the pot-house. “Look here, I’ve found out something----” Beetle began. “Listen----” “No, you don’t--till afterwards. It’s Turkey’s prep.” This meant it was a Horace Ode through which Turkey would take them for a literal translation, and all possible pitfalls. Stalky gave his businesslike attention, but Beetle’s eye was glazed and his mind adrift throughout, and he asked for things to be repeated. So, when Turkey closed the Horace, justice began to be executed.