"It ain't reading that I meant," replied Mr. Bouncer, "though that always ~does~ floor me, and no mistake! and what's the use of their making us peg away so at Latin and Greek, I can't make out. When I go out into society, I don't want to talk about those old Greek and Latin birds that they make us get up. I don't want to ask any old dowager I happen to fall in with at a tea-fight, whether she believes all the crammers that Herodotus tells us, or whether she's well up in the naughty tales and rummy nuisances that we have to pass no end of our years in getting by heart. And when I go to a ball, and do the light fantastic, I don't want to ask my partner what she thinks about Euripides, or whether she prefers Ovid's Metamorphoses to Ovid's Art of Love, and all that sort of thing; and as for requesting her to do me a problem of [158 THE ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN] Euclid, instead of working me any glorified slippers or woolleries, I'd scorn the ~h~action. I ain't like you, Charley, and I'm not ~guv~ in the classics: I saw too much of the beggars <VG158.JPG> while I was at Eton to take kindly to 'em; and just let me once get through my Greats, and see if I don't precious soon drop the acquaintance of those old classical parties!" "No you won't, old fellow!" said Charles Larkyns; "you'll find that they'll stick to you through life, just like poor relations, and you won't be able to shake them off. And you ought not to wish to do so, more especially as, in the end, you will find them to have been very rich relations." "A sort of 'O my prophetic soul, my uncle!' I suppose, Master Charley." observed Mr. Bouncer; "but what I meant when I said that I had been hard at work was, that I had been writing a letter; and, though I say it that ought not to say it, I flatter myself it's no end of a good letter." "Is it a love-letter?" asked Charles Larkyns, who was leaning against the mantelpiece, amusing himself with a cigar which he had taken from Mr. Bouncer's box. "A love-letter?" replied the little gentleman, contemptuously - "my gum! no; I should rayther think not! I may have done many foolish things in my life, but I can't have the tender passion laid to my charge. No! I've been writing my letter to the Mum: I always write to her once a term." Mr. Bouncer, it must be observed, always referred to his maternal relative (his father had been long dead) by the epithet of "the Mum." "Once a term!" said our hero, in a tone of surprise; "why I always write home once or twice every week." "You don't mean to say so, Giglamps!" replied Mr. Bouncer, with admiration. "Well, some fellers have what you call a genius for that sort of thing, you see, though what [AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 159]