The grey and lifeless Finnemore superintended the history, and, like everything else he superintended, it was scandalously neglected. Outhouse people occasionally did a little work; School House men never. Gordon began by taking quite modest privileges. He knew he had heaps of time to enlarge his advantages. He started by doing one prose and one "con" a week, instead of two proses and two "cons" like the rest of the form. He also gave up one Latin construe book and one Greek book. That meant about two hours a day to idle in his study. But he found it quite easy to turn that two into three, and he was well aware that by Christmas his daily hours of indolence would have reached five. Prothero at the present moment was only going into school for divinity and French, and as often as not he told his French master that he was so much occupied with history that he could not come to French at all. Nominally he went into school seven hours a week, actually he very rarely went in more than three. The method of teaching history at Fernhurst had been the same from time immemorial. Gordon was told to buy _Modern Europe_, by Lodge, price seven shillings and sixpence. He did not, however, put his father to this expense. History specialists in the School House had for years used the same book. It had once belonged to a fabulous Van Hepworth, who had gained a History exhibition at Selwyn somewhere in the nineties. No one knew anything of this Van Hepworth. His name was on the school boards, but he had never been seen or heard of since he had left Fernhurst for the romantic atmosphere of Cambridge. But he had left behind him a name that will be remembered in the School House as long as history is taught by Finnemore. For on his last day, in a fit of gratitude, he had left to future historians the legacy of his history notebook. It contained all that Finnemore knew! Every week Finnemore set three questions to his specialists--to be done with books. He had a stock of these questions, and Van Hepworth had written exhaustive essays on every one of them. All that was needed was to consult the oracle, and then copy out what he had written. Sometimes, by way of a change, Finnemore would think of a new subject. But Gordon would say: "Oh, sir, I have been reading about Mary de Medici, and am very much interested in her. I wondered if I could do a question on her." "Of course. I always like you to do what you are interested in. Let me see. I have a nice little question on her: 'Mary de Medici: was she an unmixed evil?' An interesting subject which raises quite a lot of points. And I have one more question for you. 'Compare Richelieu and Mazarin,' an interesting little psychological study. I think you will enjoy them." Then Gordon would have recourse to the unfailing authority, Van Hepworth. Sometimes he felt too slack to copy out the questions at all. On such occasions he would simply read Van Hepworth's essay straight out of the old, battered book.