true, and with the crib that passed from
hand to hand you could find out all you wanted in two minutes; you could
hold a Latin Grammar open on your knees while questions were passing
round; and Winks never noticed anything odd in the fact that the same
incredible mistake was to be found in a dozen different exercises. He had
no great faith in examinations, for he noticed that boys never did so well
in them as in form: it was disappointing, but not significant. In due
course they were moved up, having learned little but a cheerful effrontery
in the distortion of truth, which was possibly of greater service to them
in after life than an ability to read Latin at sight.

Then they fell into the hands of Tar. His name was Turner; he was the most
vivacious of the old masters, a short man with an immense belly, a black
beard turning now to gray, and a swarthy skin. In his clerical dress there
was indeed something in him to suggest the tar-barrel; and though on
principle he gave five hundred lines to any boy on whose lips he overheard
his nickname, at dinner-parties in the precincts he often made little
jokes about it. He was the most worldly of the masters; he dined out more
frequently than any of the others, and the society he kept was not so
exclusively clerical. The boys looked upon him as rather a dog. He left
off his clerical attire during the holidays and had been seen in
Switzerland in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine and a good dinner,
and having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a lady who was very
probably a near relation, was thenceforward supposed by generations of
schoolboys to indulge in orgies the circumstantial details of which
pointed to an unbounded belief in human depravity.

Mr. Turner reckoned that it took him a term to lick boys into shape after
they had been in the Upper Third; and now and then he let fall a sly hint,
which showed that he knew perfectly what went on in his colleague's form.
He took it good-humouredly. He looked upon boys as young ruffians who were
more apt to be truthful if it was quite certain a lie would be found out,
whose sense of honour was peculiar to themselves and did not apply to
dealings with masters, and who were least likely to be troublesome when
they learned that it did not pay. He was proud of his form and as eager at
fifty-five that it should do better in examinations than any of the others
as he had been when he first came to the school. He had the choler of the