However these things might be, it seemed my best plan to get ahead with the language, so that I might dispense as soon as possible with Poyning's sentence-by-sentence translations. I told Poyning, who told one of the attendants that I wanted a language professor, and the request was acceded to without much difficulty. I now made swift progress indeed. At Edinburgh I had enjoyed some repute as a Grecian, and though my knowledge had become heavily overlaid with the many oriental tongues I had studied in the meantime, I now found it came back to me easily enough. The prime trouble was, of course, pronunciation, but when we were stumped over this we referred to Poyning, or, if he was out of the room, resorted to writing. And thereby hangs an incident which, as it turned out, I was to be most unpleasantly reminded of later. When we came down in the snow-slide most of our possessions naturally went missing, but I had been carrying what I regarded as my most precious piece of property next to my skin. That article, a hide-bound notebook, I still possessed. In it were recorded the events of our journey, and since arriving in the city I had filled several pages with our more recent experiences. Now, when I needed paper to write the disputed sentences of Greek, I produced this notebook and used a blank leaf at the end of it, and I couldn't help noticing that the old man who was teaching me stared very straight at that volume. At the time I took this to be caused by the sight of a strange foreign object, but afterwards I was driven to suspect there was more in it than that, and that I should have been wiser to call for a slate--which was the implement used by the folk of the valley on the rare occasions when they wanted to write.