ey-cock. I
laughed aloud. The boy's yell was a clarion announcement from the
seventh heaven. I _had got the sack_! _I_ should never teach him
quadratic equations again. I should turn my back forever upon those
hateful walls and still more abominated playing-fields. And I was not
leaving my prison, as I had done once or twice before, in order to
continue my servitude elsewhere. I was free. I could go out into the
sunshine and look my fellow-man in the face, free from the haunting,
demoralising sense of incapacity. I was free. Until that urchin's shriek
I had not realised it. My teeth chattered with the thrill.

I was fortunately out of school the second hour. I employed most of
it in balancing myself. A perfectly reasonable creature, I visited the
chief. He was a chubby, rotund man, with a circular body and a circular
visage, and he wore great circular gold spectacles. He looked like a
figure in the Third Book of Euclid. But his eyes sparkled like bits of
glass in the sun.

"Well, Ordeyne?" he inquired, looking up from letters to parents.

"I have come to ask you to accept my resignation," said I. "I would like
you to release me at once."

"Come, come, things are not as bad as all that," said he, kindly.

I looked stupidly at him for a moment.

"Of course I know you've got one or two troublesome forms," he
continued.

Then I winced. His conjecture hurt me horribly.

"Oh, it's nothing to do with my incompetence," I interrupted.

"What is it, then?"

"My grandfather, two uncles, two nephews and a valet were drowned a day
or two ago in the Mediterranean," I answered, calmly.

I have since been struck by the crudity of this announcement. It took my
chief's breath away.

"I deeply sympathise with you," he said at last.

"Thank you," said I.

"A terrible catastrophe. No wonder it has upset you. Horrible! Six
living human beings! Three generations of men!"

"That's just it," said I. "Three generations of my family swept away,
leaving me now at the head of it."

At this moment the chief's wife came into the library with the morning
paper in her hand. On seeing me she rushed forward.

"Have you had bad news?"

"Yes. Is it in the paper?"

"I was coming to show my husband. The name is an uncommon one. I
wondered if they might be relatives of yours."

I bowed acquiescence. The chief looked at the paragraph below his wife's
indicating thumb, then he looked at me as if I, too, had suffered a
seachange.

"I