Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 38

I am getting on with my latin verse & am now learning 5 latin or Greek authors, namely Ovid, Cicero, Caesar, (all latin) Xenophon (Greek) & Telemachus (french) besides this we have Ovid & Cicero & English by Heart, Latin Syntax, Greek Grammar, Rules for verse, Catechism & Geography & Greek History. altogether I have to work like anything to get a prize, my marks last term were 765 and as there are 4 terms in the year if I get 765 each time I will have at the end of the year 3060 while I only require to get 2666 to get a prize, so in that case I will get one, but it all depends if I can do as well during the remaining terms as I did last.

today is a half holiday. Football is finished now & there is no more this year but Hockey & Rounders have come in which are just as good. the Dominoes you sent me at Xmas are a great source of Amusement.

I am so glad I read most of the books we have at home, because the English theme of last term for which 100 marks is given was taken from 1 of them called Blackwood Tales, the name of the story was the Iron Shroud.

The Iron Shroud, William Mudford’s gothic tale published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1830, featured a terrified prisoner held in a dungeon, the walls of which slowly close in to crush him to death:

That is to be my fate! Yon roof will descend!—these walls will hem me round—and, slowly, slowly, crush me in their iron arms!

The story may have lingered in Conan Doyle’s mind in 1891 as he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story in which the villain traps his victim in a hydraulic press:

I saw that the black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a shapeless pulp.

—‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’

For the present, though, with ‘Engineer’s Thumb’ many years in the future, twelve-year-old Arthur’s more immediate concern was the ‘Foot-baller’s Finger’.