But Mr. Perkins’ most unpopular innovation was his system of taking occasionally another man’s form.  He asked it as a favour, but after all it was a favour which could not be refused, and as Tar, otherwise Mr. Turner, said, it was undignified for all parties.  He gave no warning, but after morning prayers would say to one of the masters: 

“I wonder if you’d mind taking the Sixth today at eleven.  We’ll change over, shall we?”

They did not know whether this was usual at other schools, but certainly it had never been done at Tercanbury.  The results were curious.  Mr. Turner, who was the first victim, broke the news to his form that the headmaster would take them for Latin that day, and on the pretence that they might like to ask him a question or two so that they should not make perfect fools of themselves, spent the last quarter of an hour of the history lesson in construing for them the passage of Livy which had been set for the day; but when he rejoined his class and looked at the paper on which Mr. Perkins had written the marks, a surprise awaited him; for the two boys at the top of the form seemed to have done very ill, while others who had never distinguished themselves before were given full marks.  When he asked Eldridge, his cleverest boy, what was the meaning of this the answer came sullenly: 

“Mr. Perkins never gave us any construing to do.  He asked me what I knew about General Gordon.”

Mr. Turner looked at him in astonishment.  The boys evidently felt they had been hardly used, and he could not help agreeing with their silent dissatisfaction.  He could not see either what General Gordon had to do with Livy.  He hazarded an inquiry afterwards.

“Eldridge was dreadfully put out because you asked him what he knew about General Gordon,” he said to the headmaster, with an attempt at a chuckle.

Mr. Perkins laughed.

“I saw they’d got to the agrarian laws of Caius Gracchus, and I wondered if they knew anything about the agrarian troubles in Ireland.  But all they knew about Ireland was that Dublin was on the Liffey.  So I wondered if they’d ever heard of General Gordon.”

Then the horrid fact was disclosed that the new head had a mania for general information.  He had doubts about the utility of examinations on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion.  He wanted common sense.

Sighs grew more worried every month; he could not get the thought out of his head that Mr. Perkins would ask him to fix a day for his marriage; and he hated the attitude the head adopted towards classical literature.  There was no doubt that he was a fine scholar, and he was engaged on a work which was quite in the right tradition:  he was writing a treatise on the trees in Latin literature; but he talked of it flippantly, as though it were a pastime of no great importance, like billiards, which engaged his leisure but was not to be considered with seriousness.  And Squirts, the master of the Middle Third, grew more ill-tempered every day.