I'd
engage to take a clever girl through a whole course of Latin and Greek,
and a fair share of mathematics and logic, in a series of letters, and her
replies would be the fairest test of her acquirement.'

'Shall I propose this to my sister?'

'Do so, or to your cousin. I suspect Maritana would be an apter pupil.'

'The bell has stopped. We shall be late in the hall,' said Kearney,
throwing on his gown hurriedly and hastening away; while Atlee, taking some
proof-sheets from the chimney-piece, proceeded to correct them, a slight
flicker of a smile still lingering over his dark but handsome face.

Though such little jarring passages as those we have recorded were nothing
uncommon between these two young men, they were very good friends on the
whole, the very dissimilarity that provoked their squabbles saving them
from any more serious rivalry. In reality, no two people could be less
alike: Kearney being a slow, plodding, self-satisfied, dull man, of
very ordinary faculties; while the other was an indolent, discursive,
sharp-witted fellow, mastering whatever he addressed himself to with ease,
but so enamoured of novelty that he rarely went beyond a smattering of
anything. He carried away college honours apparently at will, and might,
many thought, have won a fellowship with little effort; but his passion
was for change. Whatever bore upon the rogueries of letters, the frauds of
literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he
would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his
delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of
plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate
had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most
ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch
of Baron Beust that actually deceived the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and
caused quite a panic at the Tuileries. He had established such relations
with foreign journals that he could at any moment command insertion for
a paper, now in the _Memorial Diplomatique_, now in the _Golos_ of St.
Petersburg, or the _Allgemeine Zeitung_; while the comment, written also
by himself, would appear in the _Kreuz Zeitung_ or the _Times_; and the
mystification became such that the shrewdest and keenest heads were
constantly misled, to which side to incline in a controversy where all the
wires were pulled by one hand. Many a di