ld tell him to make learning
delightful to them, and associated, as far as our detestable climate
would allow, with open-air studies in cowslip meadows and under hawthorn
hedges. If I had only read dear Horace at school, should I ever have
loved him as I do? No; my old tutor taught me to feel all the delight
and the sweet savor of him, roaming in the oak woods of my own old
place."

"I am devoutly thankful," says his host, "that Dorothy among her
caprices had never had the fancy you have, for a Dr. Johnson _double_
with a Ruskin, to correct my quotations, abuse my architecture, and make
prigs of the children."

"Prigs!" exclaims Brandolin. "Prigs! When did ever real scholarship and
love of nature make anything approaching to a prig? Science and
class-rooms make prigs, not Latin verse and cowslip meadows."

"That is true, I think," says the Princess Xenia, with her serious
smile.

"If they are beginning to agree with one another I shall be _de trop_,"
thinks Usk, who is very good-natured to his guests, and popular enough
with women not to be resigned to play what is vulgarly termed "second
fiddle" (though why an expression borrowed from the orchestra should be
vulgar it were hard to say). So he goes a few paces off to speak to a
gardener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, leaving Brandolin
and Madame Sabaroff to themselves in the green yew-helmet arbor.

Brandolin is in love with his subject, and does not abandon it.

"It is absurd," he continues, "the way in which children are made to
loathe all scholarship by its association with their own pains and
subjection. A child is made as a punishment to learn by rote fifty lines
of Virgil. Good heavens! It ought rather to be as a reward that he
should be allowed to open Virgil! To walk in all those delicious paths
of thought should be the highest pleasure that he could be brought to
know. To listen to the music of the poets should be at once his
privilege and his recompense. To be deprived of books should be, on the
contrary, his cruellest chastisement!"

"He would be a very exceptional child, surely," says Madame Sabaroff.

"I was not an exceptional child," he answers, "but that is how I was
brought up and how I felt."

"You had an exceptional training, then?"

"It ought not to be exceptional: that is just the mischief. Up to the
time I was seventeen, I was brought up at my own place (by my father's
directions, in his will) by a most true and reverent s