《哈利波特》第一部第七次讲

Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front
of him were now piled with food. He had
never seen so many things he liked to eat on
one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork
chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and
steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries,
Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy,
ketchup, and, for some strange reason,
peppermint humbugs.

Perhaps Harry had eaten a bit too much, because he had a
very strange dream. He was wearing Professor Quirrell’s
turban, which kept talking to him, telling him he must
transfer to Slytherin at once, because it was his destiny.
Harry told the turban he didn’t want to be in Slytherin; it got
heavier and heavier; he tried to pull it off but it tightened
painfully -- and there was Malfoy, laughing at him as he
struggled with it -then Malfoy turned into the hook-nosed
teacher, Snape, whose laugh became high and cold -- there
was a burst of green light and Harry woke, sweating and
shaking.
He rolled over and fell asleep again, and when he woke next
day, he didn’t remember the dream at all.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at
Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety
ones; some that led somewhere different on a
Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that
you had to remember to jump. Then there were
doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely,
or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors
that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just
pretending

It was also very hard to remember where anything
was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.
The people in the portraits kept going to visit each
other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could
walk.

Easily the most boring class was History of Magic,
which was the only one taught by a ghost.
Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he
had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fire and
got up next morning to teach, leaving his body
behind him. Binns droned on and on while they
scribbled down names and dates, and got Emetic
the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up.

The class everyone had really been looking forward
to was Defense Against the Dark Arts, but Quirrell’s
lessons turned out to be a bit of a joke. His
classroom smelled strongly of garlic, which
everyone said was to ward off a vampire he’d
met in Romania and was afraid would be coming
back to get him one of these days. His turban, he
told them, had been given to him by an African
prince as a thank-you for getting rid of a
troublesome zombie, but they weren’t sure they
believed this story

For one thing, when Seamus Finnigan asked
eagerly to hear how Quirrell had fought off
the zombie, Quirrell went pink and started
talking about the weather; for another, they
had noticed that a funny smell hung around
the turban, and the Weasley twins insisted
that it was stuffed full of garlic as well, so that
Quirrell was protected wherever he went.

At three-thirty that afternoon, Harry, Ron,
and the other Gryffindors hurried down the
front steps onto the grounds for their first
flying lesson. It was a clear, breezy day, and
the grass rippled under their feet as they
marched down the sloping lawns toward a
smooth, flat lawn on the opposite side of the
grounds to the forbidden forest, whose trees
were swaying darkly in the distance

The Slytherins were already there, and so were
twenty broomsticks lying in neat lines on the
ground. Harry had heard Fred and George Weasley
complain about the school brooms, saying that
some of them started to vibrate if you flew too high,
or always flew slightly to the left.