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 any-how 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 to him, poked him and whispered to him to look
sharp. But he didn't seem to attend. I looked at his paper and saw he had
put down nothing at all. So I jogged him again harder than before and
upbraided him sharply for keeping us all waiting. That did have some effect.
He started and seemed to wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a
couple of lines on his paper, and showed it up with the rest. As it was the
last, or nearly the last, to come in, and as Sampson had a good deal to say
to the boys who had written meminiscimus patri meo and the rest of it, it
turned out that the clock struck twelve before he had got to McLeod, and
McLeod had to wait afterwards to have his sentence corrected. There was
nothing much going on  outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come.