Our remembrance of Our School presents the Latin master as a
colorless, 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 color--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 caned that boy for inattention, and happily expressed his feelings
toward 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 forever 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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