“Then stand aside, and blow your nose,” said the professor, grinning like a fatherly fiend, “while the next boy reads.” Jan was the next boy, and the last; and he strode forward too indignant on his friend’s account to think of himself, and cut straight into the laugh at Carpenter’s expense. Nothing, in fact, could have given Jan such a moral fillip at the last moment. He cried out his bit aggressively at the top of his voice, but forgot none of the rules laid down, and even felt he had come through with flying colours. He saw no smile upon the sea of faces upturned from the body of the schoolroom. Not a syllable fell from the Head Master on his right. Yet he was not given his dismissal, and was consequently about to begin another sentence when Professor Abinger took the book from Jan’s hand. “I think you must hear yourself as others hear you,” said he. “Have the goodness to listen to me.” And he read: “_‘The bleached bawnes of men who had perished at sea and soonk belaw peeped forth from the arms of soome, w’ile oothers clootched roodders and sea chests or the skeleeton of some land aneemal; and most horreeble of all, a little mermaird whom they had caught and sooffercairted.’_ There!” cried the professor, holding up his hand to quell the shouts of laughter. “What do you think of that?” Jan stood dumfounded by his shame and rage, a graceless and forbidding figure enough, with untidy hair and a wreck of a tie, and one lace trailing: a figure made to look even meaner than it was by the spruce old handsome man at his side. “What dost tha’ think o’ yon?” pursued the professor, dropping into dialect with ready humour. “It’s not what I said,” muttered Jan, so low that his questioner alone could hear. “Not what you said, eh? We’ll take you through it. How do you pronounce 'bones’?” No answer, but a firmer cast to the jaw of Jan, a less abject droop of the shoulders, a good inch more in actual stature. “B, o, n, e, s!” crooned the professor, shewing all his teeth. But Jan had turned into a human mule. And the silence in the great room had suddenly grown profound. “Well, we’ll try something else,” said the professor, consulting the text somewhat unsteadily, and speaking in a rather thin voice. “Let us hear you say the word 'sunk.’ S, u, n, k—sunk. Now, if you please, no more folly. You are wasting all our time.” Jan had forgotten that; the reminder caused him a spasm of satisfaction. Otherwise he was by this time as entirely aware of his folly as anybody else present; but it was too late to point it out to him; it was too late to think of it now; his head was burning, his temples throbbed, his tongue clave. He could not have spoken now if he had tried. But it would have taken a better man than Abinger to make him try. And the better man sat by without a word, pale, stern, and troubled with a complex indignation.