Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts, 
Teach us something please, 
Whether we be old and bald 
Or young with scabby knees, 
Our heads could do with filling 
With some interesting stuff, 
For now they’re bare and full of air, 
Dead flies and bits of fluff, 
So teach us things worth knowing, 
Bring back what we’ve forgot, 
Just do your best, we’ll do the rest, 
And learn until our brains all rot.
” 
Everybody finished the song at different times. At last, only the 
Weasley twins were left singing along to a very slow funeral march. 
Dumbledore conducted their last few lines with his wand and 
when they had finished, he was one of those who clapped loudest. 
“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do 
here! And now, bedtime. Off you trot!” 
The Gryffindor first years followed Percy through the chattering 
crowds, out of the Great Hall, and up the marble staircase. Harry’s 
legs were like lead again, but only because he was so tired and full 
of food. He was too sleepy even to be surprised that the people in 
the portraits along the corridors whispered and pointed as they 
passed, or that twice Percy led them through doorways hidden be-
hind sliding panels and hanging tapestries. They climbed more

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THE SORTING HAT 
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staircases, yawning and dragging their feet, and Harry was just 
wondering how much farther they had to go when they came to a 
sudden halt. 
A bundle of walking sticks was floating in midair ahead of them, 
and as Percy took a step toward them they started throwing them-
selves at him. 
“Peeves,” Percy whispered to the first years. “A poltergeist.” He 
raised his voice, “Peeves — show yourself.” 
A loud, rude sound, like the air being let out of a balloon, an-
swered. 
“Do you want me to go to the Bloody Baron?” 
There was a pop, and a little man with wicked, dark eyes and a 
wide mouth appeared, floating cross-legged in the air, clutching the 
walking sticks. 
“Oooooooh!” he said, with an evil cackle. “Ickle Firsties! What 
fun!” 
He swooped suddenly at them. They all ducked. 
“Go away, Peeves, or the Baron’ll hear about this, I mean it!” 
barked Percy. 
Peeves stuck out his tongue and vanished, dropping the walking 
sticks on Neville’s head. They heard him zooming away, rattling 
coats of armor as he passed. 
“You want to watch out for Peeves,” said Percy, as they set off 
again. “The Bloody Baron’s the only one who can control him, he 
won’t even listen to us prefects. Here we are.” 
At the very end of the corridor hung a portrait of a very fat 
woman in a pink silk dress. 
“Password?” she said. 

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CHAPTER SEVEN 
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130 
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“Caput Draconis,” said Percy, and the portrait swung forward to 
reveal a round hole in the wall. They all scrambled through it — 
Neville needed a leg up — and found themselves in the Gryffindor 
common room, a cozy, round room full of squashy armchairs. 
Percy directed the girls through one door to their dormitory and 
the boys through another. At the top of a spiral staircase — they 
were obviously in one of the towers — they found their beds at 
last: five four-posters hung with deep red, velvet curtains. Their 
trunks had already been brought up. Too tired to talk much, they 
pulled on their pajamas and fell into bed. 
“Great food, isn’t it?” Ron muttered to Harry through the hang-
ings. “Get 
off,
Scabbers! He’s chewing my sheets.” 
Harry was going to ask Ron if he’d had any of the treacle tart, 
but he fell asleep almost at once. 
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. 

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C H A P T E R E I G H T 
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THE POTIONS MASTER 
here, look.” 
“Where?” 
“Next to the tall kid with the red hair.” 
“Wearing the glasses?” 
“Did you see his face?” 
“Did you see his scar?” 
Whispers followed Harry from the moment he left his dormi-
tory the next day. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tip-
toe to get a look at him, or doubled back to pass him in the 
corridors again, staring. Harry wished they wouldn’t, because he 
was trying to concentrate on finding his way to classes. 
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: 
wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led some-
where different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up 
that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that
T 

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CHAPTER EIGHT 
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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 any-
thing 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. 
The ghosts didn’t help, either. It was always a nasty shock when 
one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying 
to open. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new 
Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves the Poltergeist was 
worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when 
you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your 
head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or 
sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, “GOT 
YOUR CONK!” 
Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, 
Argus Filch. Harry and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of 
him on their very first morning. Filch found them trying to force 
their way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the en-
trance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He 
wouldn’t believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break 
into it on purpose, and was threatening to lock them in the 
dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was 
passing. 
Filch owned a cat called Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored 
creature with bulging, lamplike eyes just like Filch’s. She patrolled 
the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out 
of line, and she’d whisk off for Filch, who’d appear, wheezing, two

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seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school bet-
ter than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and could pop 
up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him, 
and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs. Norris a good 
kick. 
And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the 
classes themselves. There was a lot more to magic, as Harry quickly 
found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. 
They had to study the night skies through their telescopes every 
Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and 
the movements of the planets. Three times a week they went out to 
the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a 
dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where they learned how 
to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what 
they were used for. 
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 Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up. 
Professor Flitwick, the Charms teacher, was a tiny little wizard 
who had to stand on a pile of books to see over his desk. At the start 
of their first class he took the roll call, and when he reached Harry’s 
name he gave an excited squeak and toppled out of sight. 
Professor McGonagall was again different. Harry had been quite 
right to think she wasn’t a teacher to cross. Strict and clever, she gave 
them a talking-to the moment they sat down in her first class. 

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CHAPTER EIGHT 
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134 
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“Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous 
magic you will learn at Hogwarts,” she said. “Anyone messing 
around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been 
warned.” 
Then she changed her desk into a pig and back again. They were 
all very impressed and couldn’t wait to get started, but soon realized 
they weren’t going to be changing the furniture into animals for a 
long time. After taking a lot of complicated notes, they were each 
given a match and started trying to turn it into a needle. By the end 
of the lesson, only Hermione Granger had made any difference to 
her match; Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone 
all silver and pointy and gave Hermione a rare smile. 
The class everyone had really been looking forward to was De-
fense 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. 
Harry was very relieved to find out that he wasn’t miles behind 
everyone else. Lots of people had come from Muggle families and, 
like him, hadn’t had any idea that they were witches and wizards.

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There was so much to learn that even people like Ron didn’t have 
much of a head start. 
Friday was an important day for Harry and Ron. They finally 
managed to find their way down to the Great Hall for breakfast 
without getting lost once. 
“What have we got today?” Harry asked Ron as he poured sugar 
on his porridge. 
“Double Potions with the Slytherins,” said Ron. “Snape’s Head 
of Slytherin House. They say he always favors them — we’ll be able 
to see if it’s true.” 
“Wish McGonagall favored us,” said Harry. Professor McGona-
gall was head of Gryffindor House, but it hadn’t stopped her from 
giving them a huge pile of homework the day before. 
Just then, the mail arrived. Harry had gotten used to this by 
now, but it had given him a bit of a shock on the first morning, 
when about a hundred owls had suddenly streamed into the Great 
Hall during breakfast, circling the tables until they saw their own-
ers, and dropping letters and packages onto their laps. 
Hedwig hadn’t brought Harry anything so far. She sometimes 
flew in to nibble his ear and have a bit of toast before going off to 
sleep in the owlery with the other school owls. This morning, how-
ever, she fluttered down between the marmalade and the sugar 
bowl and dropped a note onto Harry’s plate. Harry tore it open at 
once. It said, in a very untidy scrawl: