*    *    *    *    *

"What news could possibly be good to me at this moment except the information that bubonic
plague had broken out among the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, and that they
were all confined to their beds with spots?"

*    *    *    *    *

The moment had come for me to speak. I laid a hand gently on his shoulder. He brushed it off.
I laid it on again. He brushed it off once more. I was endeavouring to lay it on for the
third time, when he moved aside and desired, with a certain petulance, to be informed
if I thought I was a ruddy osteopath.

*    *    *    *    *

...the picture you will have retained of this Fink-Nottle will have been that of a
nervous wreck, sagging at the knees, green about the gills, and picking feverishly
at the lapels of his coat in an ecstasy of craven fear. In a word, defeatist. Gussie
during the interview, had, in fine, exhibited all the earmarks of one licked to a custard.
  Vastly different was the Gussie Fink-Nottle who stood before me now.
Self-confidence seemed to ooze from the fellow's every pore. His face was flushed,
there was a jovial light in his eyes, the lips were parted in a swashbuckling smile.
And when with a genial hand he sloshed me on the back before I could sidestep, it was
as if I had been kicked by a mule.

*    *    *    *    *

The Grammar School at Market Snodsbury had, I understood, been built somewhere in the year 1416,
and, as with so many of these ancient foundations, there still seemed to brood over its
Great Hall, where the afternoon's festivities were to take place, not a little of the fug
of the centuries...In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily
lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of
heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and
boiled beef and carrots.

*    *    *    *    *

What he meant, I gathered, was that, owing to fact that Gussie had just completed a
five years' stretch of blameless seclusion among the newts, all the goofiness which
ought to have been spread out thin over those five years and had been bottled up during
that period came to the surface on this occasion in a lump - or, if you prefer to put
it that way, like a tidal wave.

*    *    *    *    *

P.K. Purvis squeaked off amidst sporadic applause, but one could not fail to note
that the sporadic was followed by a rather strained silence. It was evident that
Gussie was striking something of a new note in Market Snodsbury scholastic circles.
Looks were exchanged between parent and parent. The bearded bloke had the air of one
who had drained the bitter cup. As for Aunt Dahlia, her demeanour now told only too
clearly that her last doubts had been resolved and her verdict was in. I saw her
whisper to the Bassett, who sat on her right, and the Bassett nodded sadly and looked
like a fairy about to shed a tear and add another star to the Milky Way.

*    *    *    *    *