to inspire a
feeling for scenic mountains. Philippa's admiration of them was like a
new-pressed grape-juice after a draught of the ripe vintage. Moreover,
Bobby was difficult: the rejected of his English schools was a stiff
Ormont at lessons, a wheezy Benlew in the playground: exactly the
reverse of what should have been. A school of four languages in bracing
air, if a school with healthy dormitories, and a school of the trained
instincts we call gentlemanly, might suit Master Bobby for a trial. An
eye on the boys of the school would see in a minute what stuff they were
made of. Supposing this young Italianissimo with the English tongue
to be tolerably near the mark, with a deduction of two-thirds of the
enthusiasm, Bobby might stop at the school as long as his health held
out, or the master would keep him. Supposing half a dozen things and
more, the meeting with this Mr. Calliand was a lucky accident. But lucky
accidents are anticipated only by fools.

Lord Ormont consented to visit the school. He handed his card and
invited his guest; he had a carriage in waiting for the day, he said;
and obedient to Lady Charlotte's injunctions, he withheld Philippa from
the party. She and her maid were to pass the five hours of his absence
in efforts to keep their monkey Bobby out of the well of the solicitious
bears.

My lord left his carriage at the inn of the village lying below the
school-house on a green height. The young enthusiast was dancing him
into the condition of livid taciturnity, which could, if it would, flash
out pungent epigrams of the actual world at Operatic recitative.

'There's the old school-clock! Just in time for the half-hour before
dinner,' said Calliani, chattering two hundred to the minute, of the
habits and usages of the school, and how all had meals together,
the master, his wife, the teachers, the boys. 'And she--as for
her!' Calliani kissed finger up to the furthest skies: into which a
self-respecting sober Northener of the Isles could imagine himself to
kick enthusiastic gesticulators, if it were polite to do so.

The school-house faced the master's dwelling house, and these, with a
block of building, formed a three-sided enclosure, like barracks! Forth
from the school-house door burst a dozen shouting lads, as wasps
from the hole of their nest from a charge of powder. Out they poured
whizzing; and the frog he leaped, and pussy ran and doubled before the
hounds, and hockey-sticks waved, and away