whether he was actually word-perfect in "The Burial-March of Dundee" or not. This was Chips's sole anxiety, since he himself had left nothing to chance, when he attended Haigh after second school on the first day, and found Jan awaiting him with impassive face.
"Now, you boys!" exclaimed Haigh, when the three of them had his hall to themselves. "Begin, Carpenter."
"'Sound the fife, and cry the slogan'" began Chips, more fluently than most people read, and proceeded without a hitch for sixteen unfaltering lines.
"Rutter!" interrupted Haigh.
But Jan made no response.
"Come, come, Rutter," said Haigh, with an unforeseen touch of compassionate encouragement, as though the holidays had softened him and last term's hatchet cried for burial with Dundee. "'Lo! we bring with us the hero'"—and in the old snarl after a pause: "'Lo! we bring the conquering Græme?"
But even this prompting drew never a word from Jan.
"Give him another lead, Carpenter;" and this time Chips continued, more nervously, but not less accurately, down to the end of the first long stanza:
"Bade us strike for King and Country,
Bade us win the field, or fall!"
"Now then, Rutter: 'On the heights of Killiecrankie'—come on, my good boy!"
The anxious submissiveness of the really good boy, with the subtle flattery conveyed by implicit obedience to an overbearing demand, had so far mollified the master that Jan was evidently to have every chance. But he did not avail himself of the clemency extended by so much as opening his mouth.
