bedchamber he found the following on a
table between two candles:--

BOOK OF ENTHUSIASMS.

_Narrative of Chamilly d'Argentenaye Haviland_.

At the Friars' School at Dormilliere, racing with gleeful playmates
around the shady playground, or glibly reciting frequent "Paters" and
"Ave Marias," other ideas of life scarce ever entered my head; till one
day my father spoke, out of his calm silence, to my grandmother; and
with the last of his two or three sentences, "I don't destine him for a
Thibetan prayer-mill," (she had fondly intended me for the priesthood)
he sat down to a letter, the result of which was that I found myself in
a week at the Royal Grammar School at Montreal. Here, where the great
city appeared a wilderness of palaces and the large School an almost
universe of youthful Crichtons whose superiorities seemed to me the
greater because I knew little of their English tongue, the contrasts
with my rural Dormilliere were so striking and continual that I was set
thinking by almost every occurrence.

A French boy is nothing if not imaginative. The time seemed to me a
momentous epoch big with the question: "What path shall I follow?"

I admired the prize boys who were so clever and famous. I took a prize
myself, and felt heaven in the clapping.

I admired those equally who were skilled at athletics. I saw a
tournament of sports and envied the sparkling cups and medals.

These,--to be a brilliant man of learning _and an athlete_--seemed to me
the two great careers of existence!

The first step, out of a number that were to come, towards a great
discovery, was thus unconsciously by me taken. What is greater than
Life? what discovery is more momentous than of its profound meaning?
Anything I am or may do is the outcome of this one discovery I later
made, which seems to me the very Secret of the World.

* * * * *

But hold:--there is a memory in my earlier recollection, more fixed than
the trees--they were poplars--of the Friars' School playground. I leaped
into a seat beside my father in the carriage one day, and we drove back
far into the country. Green and pleasant all the landscape we passed. Or
did it pass us, I was thinking in my weird little mind? We arrived at
length at wide gates and drove up an avenue, lined by stately trees and
running between broad grain fields, which led to a court shaded with
leafy giants of elms and cobbled in an antique fashion; and under the
woo