Keith felt robbed like the rest. And like them, he felt that the
instruction had become a mere humdrum routine enabling a certain number
of boys to get the proper marks at the end of a certain number of
months. What had lured him on as an adventure had turned into a tedious
grind. And more and more he drifted back into a dream world of his own
out of which he had been dragged by Dally's good-humoured jibes. And
yet, what could he expect? Had not Dally even, his best friend in the
whole school, cheated him of the honour he had rightfully earned--an
honour that, once lost, could never be recovered?

The subjects, on the whole, were the same as in the previous grade. You
simply went further into them--that was all. The teachers were the same,
and the relationships once established between them and the boys
remained the same, for good or bad. Every one knew what to expect, on
both sides, and no one quite escaped from the resulting sense of
staleness.

The old Rector went on cramming the class with Latin grammar. He had a
way of making some poor stumbler conjugate the same verb fifteen to
twenty times in succession, so that the correct sequence might never
again escape his memory. And as the red-faced sinner stammered out the
tenses, the Rector would make a tube of his left hand into which he
poked his right thumb. This gesture was always accompanied by the same
mocking remark:

"That's the way to stuff sausages!"

His language grew more picturesque and unrestrained every day. He
belonged distinctly to an older and less circumspect generation, and he
was a good deal of an eccentric besides. His heart was of gold, and no
one ever took the pedagogue's mission more seriously, but whatever he
possessed of refinement went into his appreciation of the language that
was his life's passion. When he spoke Swedish, he called a spade a
spade in a manner that gave Keith shock after shock. Always rather given
to a certain aristocratic exclusiveness in his speech, Keith had through
his association with Murray become something of a prude in this respect.
He could still descend to obscenities when his "manliness" had to be
proved, but vulgarity repelled him irresistibly.

Until then he had never dreamt of questioning any authority. Even at
this juncture he obeyed directions explicity and maintained on the whole
his reputation as a good pupil. But a tendency to criticism was growing
within him, and from the men who taught him it began