Hotham.

"No, sir," said I, in the same cautious tone.

"I 'll show you the moves, when this party is over." And I muttered my
thanks for the courtesy.

"This is intolerable!" cried out my father. "That confounded whispering
is far more distracting than any noise. I have lost all count of my
game. I say, Eccles, why is not that boy in bed?"

"I thought you said he might sup, Sir Roger."

"If I did, it was because I thought he knew how to conduct himself. Take
him away at once."

And Eccles rose, and with more kindness than I had expected from him,
said, "Come, Digby, I 'll go too, for we have both to be early risers
to-morrow."

Thus ended my first day in public, and I have no need to say what a
strange conflict filled my head that night as I dropped off to sleep.

CHAPTER VI. HOW THE DAYS WENT OYER

If I give one day of my life, I give, with very nearly exactness, the
unbroken course of my existence. I rose very early--hours ere the rest
of the household was stirring--to work at my lessons, which Mr. Eccles
apportioned for me with a liberality that showed he had the highest
opinion of my abilities, or--as I discovered later on to be the truth--a
profound indifference about them. Thus, a hundred lines of Virgil,
thirty of Xenophon, three propositions of Euclid, with a sufficient
amount of history, geography, and logic, would be an ordinary day's
work. It is fair I should own that when the time of examination came, I
found him usually imbibing seltzer and curacoa, with a wet towel round
his head; or, in his robuster moments, practising the dumbbells to
develop his muscles. So that the interrogatories-were generally in this
wise:--

"How goes it, Digby? What of the Homer, eh?"

"'It 's Xenophon, sir."

"'To be sure it is. I was forgetting, as a man might who had my
headache. And, by the way, Digby, why will your father give Burgundy
at supper instead of Bordeaux? Some one must surely have told him
accidentally it was a deadly poison, for he adheres to it with desperate
fidelity."

"I believe I know my Greek, sir," would I say, modestly, to recall him
to the theme.

"Of course you do; you'd cut a sorry figure here this morning if
you did not know it. No, sir; I 'm not the man to enjoy your father's
confidence, and take his money, and betray my trust His words to me
were, 'Make him a gentleman, Eccles. I could find scores of fellows to
cram him with Greek particles and double equations, but I want the