For the Chief Gordon always worked; not, it is true, with any real measure of success, for he had rather got out of the habit of grinding at the classics, but at any rate with energy. And during these hours he began to perceive vaguely what a clear-sighted, unprejudiced mind the Chief had. To the boy in the Fourth and Fifth forms any headmaster must appear not so much a living person as the emblem of authority, the final dispenser of justice, the hard, analytical sifter of evidence, "coldly sublime, intolerably just." Gordon had always before looked on the Chief as a figurehead, who at times would unbend most surprisingly and become a man; on the cricket field, for example, when in a master's match he had fielded cleanly a terrific cut at point, and played a sporting innings; at House suppers, and, most surprisingly of all, when a row was on, Gordon had been unable to understand him. He could not dissociate him from his conception of a headmaster--a sort of Mercury, a divine emissary of the gods, sent as a necessary infliction. Yet at times the Chief was intensely human, and when Gordon came under his immediate influence and caught a glimpse of his methods, he saw in a flash that at all times his headmaster was a generous, sympathetic nature, and that it was his own distorted view that had ever made him think otherwise. The Chief was so ready to appreciate a joke, so quick with an answer, so unassuming, so utterly the antithesis of any master he had met before. There were one or two incidents that stood out clearer than any others in Gordon's memories of his Chief. At the very beginning of the term, before a start had been made on the term's work, the Chief was talking about Horace's life and characteristics. "Now, Tester," he said, "if you were asked to sum up Horace's outlook on life in a single phrase, what would you say?" Tester thought for a minute or so. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," he hazarded. The form laughed. It seemed rather a daring generalisation. But the Chief's answer came back pat: "Well, hardly that, Tester. Shall we say, Let us eat and drink, but not too much, or we shall have a stomach-ache to-morrow?" He had taken Tester's quite erroneous estimate as a basis, and had exactly hit off Horace's character. But the following incident more than any other brought home to Gordon how extraordinarily broadminded the Chief was. Carter was construing, and had made a most preposterous howler, it does not matter what. He had learnt the translation in the notes by heart, and quite failed to connect it verbatim with the Greek.