, you see how they soar above the world. Come, Kate.
Where is my hat? Ah!--thank you, my boy."

"Kitty," said my father, looking at the kite, which, attached by its
string to the peg I had stuck into the ground, rested calm in the sky,
"never fear but what our kite shall fly as high; only, the human soul
has stronger instincts to mount upward than a few sheets of paper on
a framework of lath. But observe that to prevent its being lost in
the freedom of space,--we must attach it lightly to earth; and observe
again, my dear, that the higher it soars, the more string we must give
it."

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

When I had reached the age of twelve, I had got to the head of the
preparatory school to which I had been sent. And having thus exhausted
all the oxygen of learning in that little receiver, my parents looked
out for a wider range for my inspirations. During the last two years in
which I had been at school, my love for study had returned; but it was
a vigorous, wakeful, undreamy love, stimulated by competition, and
animated by the practical desire to excel.

My father no longer sought to curb my intellectual aspirings. He had too
great a reverence for scholarship not to wish me to become a scholar if
possible; though he more than once said to me somewhat sadly, "Master
books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read.
One slave of the lamp is enough for a household; my servitude must not
be a hereditary bondage."

My father looked round for a suitable academy; and the fame of Dr.
Herman's "Philhellenic Institute" came to his ears.

Now, this Dr. Herman was the son of a German music-master who had
settled in England. He had completed his own education at the University
of Bonn; but finding learning too common a drug in that market to bring
the high price at which he valued his own, and having some theories as
to political freedom which attached him to England, he resolved upon
setting up a school, which he designed as an "Era in the History of the
Human Mind." Dr. Herman was one of the earliest of those new-fashioned
authorities in education who have, more lately, spread pretty numerously
amongst us, and would have given, perhaps, a dangerous shake to the
foundations of our great classical seminaries, if those last had not
very wisely, though very cautiously, borrowed some of the more sensible
principles which lay mixed and adulterated amongst the crotchets and
chimeras of their i