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 made him lose his place. He thought it was some beautiful kind of insect with the sunshine caught in its wings.

"It was like a messenger from the summer!" he said to himself.

Then he dipped his pen in the ink-pot and went back to his sums.

He had been working busily for some time when he noticed something very curious. His pen was not writing figures at all! He was thinking about figures, and he wished to put figures on the paper, so it was a very strange thing that his pen was writing words all the time. The words were arranged in short lines with a capital letter at the beginning of each line,

"Dear me, how annoying!" he said to himself. "What can I have been thinking of? This will never do."

So he took a fresh sheet and began again.

He imagined that he was copying all the figures on to the clean sheet of paper, for that was what he intended to do. He wrote the figures very quickly, as he thought because he wanted to make up for lost time. Then he glanced at what he had written—and threw down his pen angrily.

There were no figures at all on the paper; nothing but line after line of words. He began to think he must have got a sunstroke.

"This is really terrible!" he muttered. "I must pay more attention to what I am doing."

So he took another clean sheet of paper and began again.

It was no use; the pen refused to make a single figure. 91