Dictation, made at the desk

— Edmund Harrow. Twenty-seventh of February, nineteen eighty-nine. I am dictating rather than writing because I wish the record of this to be one that I cannot go back over.

— The check is as follows. I have before me transcription B, folded and unread since it was made. I will state from memory what stands at folio nine, lines four to eight. I will then unfold the sheet and read what is there. I shall not stop the tape between the two, and I shall not read ahead.

— From memory. Folio nine, lines four to eight: the clause of the naming, then the clause of the measure, then the two clauses of the keeping, then the clause of the return. Five clauses. That is the order in transcription B. I am confident of it, and I would have said so under oath, which is a phrase I use advisedly and not often.

— Unfolding the sheet. Folio nine. Lines four to eight. Five clauses. The words are the words I expected, every one of them, in my own hand, on the paper I bought in Durham.

— The order is the clause of the measure, then the clause of the return, then the naming, then the two clauses of the keeping.

— I record that the check was carried out as described and that its result was not the expected one. I do not offer an explanation. I have two, and both of them are about me, and neither of them is testable this afternoon.

— A remark for whoever hears this, since I am seventy-one and the tape will outlast the matter. I am not troubled. A scholar who has never found his own record at variance with his memory has not looked. What I object to is that the variance is orderly. Errors are untidy. This is tidy, and I have not yet met a tidy error.

— I shall write to Levinge in the morning and ask him for a second transcriber, which I should have done in nineteen eighty-four and did not, out of vanity.

— End of dictation.