great sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a
terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence
when the pens scraped lightly. But to drink the altar wine out of the
press and be found out by the smell was a sin too: but it was not
terrible and strange. It only made you feel a little sickish on account
of the smell of the wine. Because on the day when he had made his first
holy communion in the chapel he had shut his eyes and opened his mouth
and put out his tongue a little: and when the rector had stooped down
to give him the holy communion he had smelt a faint winy smell off the
rector's breath after the wine of the mass. The word was beautiful:
wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark
purple that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples. But the
faint smell of the rector's breath had made him feel a sick feeling on
the morning of his first communion. The day of your first communion was
the happiest day of your life. And once a lot of generals had asked
Napoleon what was the happiest day of his life. They thought he would
say the day he won some great battle or the day he was made an emperor.
But he said:

--Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made
my first holy communion.

Father Arnall came in and the Latin lesson began and he remained still,
leaning on the desk with his arms folded. Father Arnall gave out the
theme-books and he said that they were scandalous and that they were
all to be written out again with the corrections at once. But the worst
of all was Fleming's theme because the pages were stuck together by a
blot: and Father Arnall held it up by a corner and said it was an
insult to any master to send him up such a theme. Then he asked Jack
Lawton to decline the noun MARE and Jack Lawton stopped at the ablative
singular and could not go on with the plural.

--You should be ashamed of yourself, said Father Arnall sternly. You,
the leader of the class!

Then he asked the next boy and the next and the next. Nobody knew.
Father Arnall became very quiet, more and more quiet as each boy tried
to answer it and could not. But his face was black-looking and
his eyes were staring though his voice was so quiet. Then he asked
Fleming and Fleming said that the word had no plural. Father Arnall
suddenly shut the book and shouted at him:

--Kneel out there in the middle of the class. You are one of the
idlest boys I e