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Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories by M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
page 5 of 153 (03%)
'One term--perhaps it was my third or fourth--a new master made his
appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale,
black-bearded man. I think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal,
and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was
some competition among us to get within earshot of him. I remember
too--dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then!--that he had a
charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let
me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin; there was an
effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been worn
practically smooth, and he had had cut on it--rather barbarously--his own
initials, G.W.S., and a date, 24 July, 1865. Yes, I can see it now: he
told me he had picked it up in Constantinople: it was about the size of a
florin, perhaps rather smaller.

'Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing
Latin grammar with us. One of his favourite methods--perhaps it is rather
a good one--was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to
illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a
thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent: there are
lots of school stories in which that happens--or anyhow there might be.
But Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of trying that
on with him. Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to express
_remembering_ in Latin: and he ordered us each to make a sentence
bringing in the verb _memini_, "I remember." Well, most of us made up
some ordinary sentence such as "I remember my father," or "He remembers
his book," or something equally uninteresting: and I dare say a good many
put down _memino librum meum_, and so forth: but the boy I
mentioned--McLeod--was evidently thinking of something more elaborate
than that. The rest of us wanted to have our sentences passed, and get on
to something else, so some kicked him under the desk, and I, who was next
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