It was in his form that Philip was put on entering the school.  The Rev. B. B. Gordon was a man by nature ill-suited to be a schoolmaster:  he was impatient and choleric.  With no one to call him to account, with only small boys to face him, he had long lost all power of self-control.  He began his work in a rage and ended it in a passion.  He was a man of middle height and of a corpulent figure; he had sandy hair, worn very short and now growing gray, and a small bristly moustache.  His large face, with indistinct features and small blue eyes, was naturally red, but during his frequent attacks of anger it grew dark and purple.  His nails were bitten to the quick, for while some trembling boy was construing he would sit at his desk shaking with the fury that consumed him, and gnaw his fingers.  Stories, perhaps exaggerated, were told of his violence, and two years before there had been some excitement in the school when it was heard that one father was threatening a prosecution:  he had boxed the ears of a boy named Walters with a book so violently that his hearing was affected and the boy had to be taken away from the school.  The boy’s father lived in Tercanbury, and there had been much indignation in the city, the local paper had referred to the matter; but Mr. Walters was only a brewer, so the sympathy was divided.  The rest of the boys, for reasons best known to themselves, though they loathed the master, took his side in the affair, and, to show their indignation that the school’s business had been dealt with outside, made things as uncomfortable as they could for Walters’ younger brother, who still remained.  But Mr. Gordon had only escaped the country living by the skin of his teeth, and he had never hit a boy since.  The right the masters possessed to cane boys on the hand was taken away from them, and Squirts could no longer emphasize his anger by beating his desk with the cane.  He never did more now than take a boy by the shoulders and shake him.  He still made a naughty or refractory lad stand with one arm stretched out for anything from ten minutes to half an hour, and he was as violent as before with his tongue.

No master could have been more unfitted to teach things to so shy a boy as Philip.  He had come to the school with fewer terrors than he had when first he went to Mr. Watson’s.  He knew a good many boys who had been with him at the preparatory school.  He felt more grownup, and instinctively realised that among the larger numbers his deformity would be less noticeable.  But from the first day Mr. Gordon struck terror in his heart; and the master, quick to discern the boys who were frightened of him, seemed on that account to take a peculiar dislike to him.  Philip had enjoyed his work, but now he began to look upon the hours passed in school with horror.  Rather than risk an answer which might be wrong and excite a storm of abuse from the master, he would sit stupidly silent, and when it came towards his turn to stand up and construe he grew sick and white with apprehension.  His happy moments were those when Mr. Perkins took the form.  He was able to gratify the passion for general knowledge which beset the headmaster; he had read all sorts of strange books beyond his years, and often Mr. Perkins, when a question was going round the room, would stop at Philip with a smile that filled the boy with rapture, and say: