Our remembrance of Our School, presents the Latin master as a colourless
doubled-up near-sighted man with a crutch, who was always cold, and
always putting onions into his ears for deafness, and always disclosing
ends of flannel under all his garments, and almost always applying a ball
of pocket-handkerchief to some part of his face with a screwing action
round and round. He was a very good scholar, and took great pains where
he saw intelligence and a desire to learn: otherwise, perhaps not. Our
memory presents him (unless teased into a passion) with as little energy
as colour—as having been worried and tormented into monotonous
feebleness—as having had the best part of his life ground out of him in a
Mill of boys. We remember with terror how he fell asleep one sultry
afternoon with the little smuggled class before him, and awoke not when
the footstep of the Chief fell heavy on the floor; how the Chief aroused
him, in the midst of a dread silence, and said, ‘Mr. Blinkins, are you
ill, sir?’ how he blushingly replied, ‘Sir, rather so;’ how the Chief
retorted with severity, ‘Mr. Blinkins, this is no place to be ill in’
(which was very, very true), and walked back solemn as the ghost in
Hamlet, until, catching a wandering eye, he called that boy for
inattention, and happily expressed his feelings towards the Latin master
through the medium of a substitute.
There was a fat little dancing-master who used to come in a gig, and
taught the more advanced among us hornpipes (as an accomplishment in
great social demand in after life); and there was a brisk little French
master who used to come in the sunniest weather, with a handleless
umbrella, and to whom the Chief was always polite, because (as we
believed), if the Chief offended him, he would instantly address the
Chief in French, and for ever confound him before the boys with his
inability to understand or reply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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