elusive; but Mike did not doubt that in some way or other his form
master would endeavor to get a bit of his own back.

As events turned out, he was perfectly right. When a master has got his
knife into a boy, especially a master who allows himself to be
influenced by his likes and dislikes, he is inclined to single him out
in times of stress, and savage him as if he were the official
representative of the evildoers. Just as, at sea, the skipper when he
has trouble with the crew, works it off on the boy.

Mr. Downing was in a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say, he
began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to keep
up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had given
place to the bludgeon. For sarcasm to be effective, the user of it must
be met halfway. His hearer must appear to be conscious of the sarcasm
and moved by it. Mike, when masters waxed sarcastic toward him, always
assumed an air of stolid stupidity, which was as a suit of mail
against satire.

So Mr. Downing came down from the heights with a run, and began to
express himself with a simple strength which it did his form good to
listen to. Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterward
that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the
orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers, who
had left at Christmas to go to a crammer's, had introduced three lively
grass snakes into the room during a Latin lesson.

"You are surrounded," concluded Mr. Downing, snapping his pencil in two
in his emotion, "by an impenetrable mass of conceit and vanity and
selfishness. It does not occur to you to admit your capabilities as a
cricketer in an open, straightforward way and place them at the disposal
of the school. No, that would not be dramatic enough for you. It would
be too commonplace altogether. Far too commonplace!" Mr. Downing laughed
bitterly. "No, you must conceal your capabilities. You must act a lie.
You must--who is that shuffling his feet? I will not have it, I _will_
have silence--you must hang back in order to make a more effective
entrance, like some wretched actor who--I will _not_ have this
shuffling. I have spoken of this before. Macpherson, are you shuffling
your feet?"

"Sir, no, sir."

"Please, sir."

"Well, Parsons?"

"I think it's the noise of the draft under the door, sir."

Instant departure of Parsons for the outer regions. And, in the
excit