Well, Nubbs sang the solos in chapel on Sundays, and people came from far to hear him do it; in consequence of which, so Steggles said, the Doctor favored him, and regarded him as an advertisement to Dunston’s. But his singing wasn’t in it compared with the advertisement he gave the Doctor on Guy Fawkes’s Night the term before Slade left. To explain the whole tremendous thing I must tell you that Nubbs belonged to the chemistry class. This class, in fact, was pretty well started for him, his father telling Dunston, so Nubbs said, that he shouldn’t send him at all if he couldn’t be taught chemistry; because Nubbs had shown a good deal of keenness for chemicals generally from the earliest days, and bought little boxes of “serpents’ eggs” and red fire instead of sweets ever since he was old enough to buy anything. He had also blown off his eyebrows and eyelashes with a mixture he was grinding up in a mortar, and they had never grown again to this day--all of which things showed he had chemistry in him to a great extent. So the Doctor started a chemistry class, and a chap called Stoddart, from Merivale, came up once a week to take it; and Nubbs joined, and so did I, not because I had chemistry in me worth speaking of, but because I was a chum of Nubby’s. Wilson also joined, and so did Hodges. I may mention my name is Mathers. I always thought that chemists simply mix the muck doctors give you when you’re queer, but it seems not. In fact, there are several sorts of chemists, and Nubbs said he hoped to belong to the best sort, who don’t have bottles of red and green stuff in the windows, and so on. He said a man who sold pills and tooth-brushes, and liquorice-root and soap, could not be considered a classy chemist. The real flyers made discoveries and froze air, and sneaked one another’s inventions, and got knighted by the Queen if they had luck and if they were well thought of by the newspapers. I should think really Nubbs might come to being knighted if he sticks to it, for even down to the stuff in cough lozenges nothing is hid from him.