Soon they did look in another direction.  While big sheets of foolscap were being distributed to every desk, Miss Wilson, the teacher (an austere-looking young woman who went through the world as though it were a refrigerator, and who, even on the warmest days in the classroom, was to be found with a shawl or cape about her shoulders), arose, and on the blackboard where all could see wrote the Roman numeral “I.”  Every eye, and there were fifty pairs of them, hung with expectancy upon her hand, and in the pause that followed the room was quiet as the grave.

Underneath the Roman numeral “I” she wrote:  “(a) What were the laws of Draco? (b) Why did an Athenian orator say that they were written ’not in ink, but in blood’?”

Forty-nine heads bent down and forty-nine pens scratched lustily across as many sheets of foolscap.  Joe’s head alone remained up, and he regarded the blackboard with so blank a stare that Miss Wilson, glancing over her shoulder after having written “II,” stopped to look at him.  Then she wrote: 

“(a) How did the war between Athens and Megara, respecting the island of Salamis, bring about the reforms of Solon? (b) In what way did they differ from the laws of Draco?”

She turned to look at Joe again.  He was staring as blankly as ever.

“What is the matter, Joe?” she asked.  “Have you no paper?”

“Yes, I have, thank you,” he answered, and began moodily to sharpen a lead-pencil.

He made a fine point to it.  Then he made a very fine point.  Then, and with infinite patience, he proceeded to make it very much finer.  Several of his classmates raised their heads inquiringly at the noise.  But he did not notice.  He was too absorbed in his pencil-sharpening and in thinking thoughts far away from both pencil-sharpening and Greek history.

“Of course you all understand that the examination papers are to be written with ink.”

Miss Wilson addressed the class in general, but her eyes rested on Joe.

Just as it was about as fine as it could possibly be the point broke, and Joe began over again.

“I am afraid, Joe, that you annoy the class,” Miss Wilson said in final desperation.

He put the pencil down, closed the knife with a snap, and returned to his blank staring at the blackboard.  What did he know about Draco? or Solon? or the rest of the Greeks?  It was a flunk, and that was all there was to it.  No need for him to look at the rest of the questions, and even if he did know the answers to two or three, there was no use in writing them down.  It would not prevent the flunk.  Besides, his arm hurt him too much to write.  It hurt his eyes to look at the blackboard, and his eyes hurt even when they were closed; and it seemed positively to hurt him to think.

So the forty-nine pens scratched on in a race after Miss Wilson, who was covering the blackboard with question after question; and he listened to the scratching, and watched the questions growing under her chalk, and was very miserable indeed.  His head seemed whirling around.  It ached inside and was sore outside, and he did not seem to have any control of it at all.