Page 63 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel
and unfair.
He could not eat the blackish fish fritters they got on
Wednesdays in lent and one of his potatoes had the mark of
the spade in it. Yes, he would do what the fellows had told
him. He would go up and tell the rector that he had been
wrongly punished. A thing like that had been done before
by somebody in history, by some great person whose head
was in the books of history. And the rector would declare
that he had been wrongly punished because the senate and
the Roman people always declared that the men who did
that had been wrongly punished. Those were the great men
whose names were in Richmal Magnall’s Questions. His-
tory was all about those men and what they did and that
was what Peter Parley’s Tales about Greece and Rome were
all about. Peter Parley himself was on the first page in a pic-
ture. There was a road over a heath with grass at the side and
little bushes: and Peter Parley had a broad hat like a protes-
tant minister and a big stick and he was walking fast along
the road to Greece and Rome.
It was easy what he had to do. All he had to do was when
the dinner was over and he came out in his turn to go on
walking but not out to the corridor but up the staircase on
the right that led to the castle. He had nothing to do but
that: to turn to the right and walk fast up the staircase and
in half a minute he would be in the low dark narrow cor-
ridor that led through the castle to the rector’s room. And
every fellow had said that it was unfair, even the fellow out
of second of grammar who had said that about the senate

63