Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/109

 "Then stand aside, and blow your nose," said the professor, grinning like a fatherly fiend, "while the next boy reads."

Jan was the next boy, and the last; and he strode forward too indignant on his friend's account to think of himself, and cut straight into the laugh at Carpenter's expense. Nothing, in fact, could have given Jan such a moral fillip at the last moment. He cried out his bit aggressively at the top of his voice, but forgot none of the rules laid down, and even felt he had come through with flying colours. He saw no smile upon the sea of faces upturned from the body of the schoolroom. Not a syllable fell from the Head Master on his right. Yet he was not given his dismissal, and was consequently about to begin another sentence when Professor Abinger took the book from Jan's hand.

"I think you must hear yourself as others hear you," said he. "Have the goodness to listen to me." And he read: The bleached bawnes of men who had perished at sea and soonk belaw peeped forth from the arms of soome, w'ile oothers clootched roodders and sea chests or the skeleeton of some land aneemal; and most horreeble of all, a little mermaird whom they had caught and sooffercairted.' There!" cried the professor, holding up his hand to quell the shouts of laughter. "What do you think of that?"

Jan stood dumfounded by his shame and rage, a graceless and forbidding figure enough, with untidy hair and a wreck of a tie, and one lace trailing: a figure made to look even meaner than it was by the spruce old handsome man at his side.

"What dost tha' think o' yon?" pursued the professor, dropping into dialect with ready humour.

"It's not what I said," muttered Jan, so low that his questioner alone could hear.