xt they met Mr. Matthew Arnold, smiling a happy smile, and
concocting a 'childlike and bland' article for the 'Nineteenth Century'
on the present crisis. So they flew on westward till, gaining a freer
and fresher neighbourhood, they came upon a wide green lawn, and on
the lawn three old acquaintances, the Poet, the Palaeonto-theologist,
and--wholly altered from the pale and dreamy boy of their
recollection--Walter, the Professor's child.

The Professor was a man given to promptitude of speech and action, and,
once awakened to the serious state of Walter's health, physical and
mental, he had resolved, at whatever discomfort to himself, to check the
boy's undue mental precocity and substitute for it mere physical vigour.
He was content with no half-measures, and he sent the lad at once to a
preparatory school for Eton. At Eton he knew Walter's brain would have a
rest. The effect was miraculous. The boy, whom the Palaeonto-theologist
had rashly invited to spend a holiday at his home, was a different
creature. He had become sturdy and robust; he had forgotten his new
religion of Dala, with his science primers, and could no more have
composed a hymn to a fairy than he could have endured a false quantity.
He had forgotten the Goona stones; he had forgotten the dates of the
Kings of England. He said that bogies were all bosh; he said that
Cardinal Wolsey was imprisoned in the Tower for thirteen years and wrote
'Robinson Crusoe' there, and that the Nile rose in Mungo Park. He had
forgotten his father's instructions, and regarded birds, not as products
of Evolution, but as things suitable to shy stones at, and to be treated
with contempt, and catapults. He was incorrigible at Euclid, but he was
excellent at cricket, and on this occasion he had fagged the Poet and
the Palaeonto-theologist to bowl to and field out for him. It was beyond
human nature to expect them to enjoy it. The Poet was in the midst of a
sublime stanza when he was peremptorily ordered to come and bowl, and he
went dreamily and reluctantly, to be greeted with a further mandate of
'Look sharp there!' The Palaeonto-theologist was deep in an exhaustive
inventory of the animals in Noah's Ark, and was discussing the
probability of the Mammoth's having been one of its residents. If so,
there came the knotty point of how Noah contrived to stow him and the
Megatherium in comfortably, and whether they never wanted to do away
with the other animals, in which case the Patri