By gulping down his milk and taking his dog-rock with him to his study, Carpenter was able to devote a good half-hour to Jan’s verses and still give Jan ten minutes to copy out the revised version; the ten minutes was ample, but the half-hour was all too short. The very first line began with a false quantity, and ended with a grammatical blunder. Carpenter rectified the false quantity by a simple transposition, and made so bold as to substitute _perisse_ for _moriri_ at the end of the hexameter. The second half of the pentameter was hopeless: Chips fell back on his own, merely changing _causa doloris_ to _fletus acerbus_, and plumed himself on his facility. But in the second couplet every other foot was a flogging matter if Jan got sent up. “I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.” Chips loved the lines well enough to blush for his own respectable attempt at a Latin rendering; but his blood ran cold at Jan’s— “Flevi quum memini nostro quam sæpe loquendo Defessum Phœbum fecimus ire domum.” He flung himself on the monstrosity, but had to leave it at— “Cum lacrymis memini nostro quam sæpe loquendo Hesperias Phœbus fessus adisset aquas.” Chips did not plume himself on this; but at any rate _nostro loquendo_ was Jan’s own gem, and just bad enough to distract attention from the suspicious superiority of the rest without invoking the direst consequences. This was a subtle calculation on the part of Carpenter. He was quite conscious of the subtlety, and by no means as ashamed of it as such a desperately honest person should have been. He justified the means by the end, which was to save Jan a certain flogging; and the stage after justification was something very like a guilty relish in a first offence. There was an artistic satisfaction in doing the thing as deftly as Chips was doing it. The third couplet might almost have passed muster as Jan had left it; a touch or two and it was safe. But the last hexameter would never do, and Chips replaced it with a plagiarism of his own corresponding line which might have sufficed if he himself had not come curiously to grief over the last hexameter. “Excellent, as usual, Carpenter,” said Haigh in the fulness of time. “I could have given you full marks but for an odd mistake of yours towards the end. You seem to have misread the original penultimate line: 'Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;’ what part of speech do you take that 'still’ to be?” “Adjective, sir,” said Chips, beginning to wonder whether it was one. “Exactly!” cried Haigh, with the guffaw of his lighter moments. “So you get _Muta silet vox ista placens, tua carmina vivunt_—'Thy pleasant voices are still; on the other hand, however, thy nightingales are awake’—eh?” “Yes, sir,” said Chips, more doubtfully than before.