the grace, elegance and beauty of Euclid can go nowhere but up. In what direction and no other can this boy go, boys? Up, sir. Without  Euclid,  boys,  mathematics  would  be  a  poor  doddering thing. Without Euclid we wouldn’t be able to go from here to there. Without Euclid the bicycle would have no wheel.Without Euclid St. Joseph could not have been a carpenter for carpentry is geometry and geometry  is  carpentry. Without  Euclid  this  very  school  could  never have been built. Paddy Clohessy mutters behind me, Feckin’ Euclid. Dotty barks at him.You, boy, what is your name? Clohessy, sir. Ah, the boy flies on one wing.What is your Christian name? Paddy. Paddy what? Paddy, sir. And what, Paddy, were you saying to McCourt? I said we should get down on our two knees and thank God for Euclid. I’m sure you did, Clohessy. I see the lie festering in your teeth.What do I see, boys? The lie, sir. And what is the lie doing, boys? Festering, sir. Where, boys, where? In his teeth, sir. Euclid, boys, was a Greek.What, Clohessy, is a Greek? Some class of a foreigner, sir. Clohessy, you are a half-wit. Now, Brendan, surely you know what a Greek is? Yes, sir. Euclid was a Greek. Dotty gives him the little smile. He tells Clohessy he should model himself on Quigley, who knows what a Greek is. He draws two lines side by side and tells us these are parallel lines and the magical and mys- terious thing is that they never meet, not if they were to be extended to infinity, not if they were extended to God’s shoulders and that, boys, is a long way though there is a German Jew who is upsetting the whole world with his ideas on parallel lines. We listen to Dotty and wonder what all this has to do with the state 152