" asked the other, impatiently.

"Just because nothing lasts that has its origin in ignorance. The boy
has seen nothing of life, has had no opportunity for forming a judgment
or instituting a comparison between any two objects. The first shot
that breaches that same fortress of belief, down will come the whole
edifice!"

"You 'd give a lad to the Jesuits, then, to be trained up in every
artifice and distrust?"

"Far from it, Harcourt. I think their system a mistake all through. The
science of life must be self-learned, and it is a slow acquisition.
All that education can do is to prepare the mind to receive it. Now, to
employ the first years of a boy's life by storing him with prejudices,
is just to encumber a vessel with a rotten cargo that she must throw
overboard before she can load with a profitable freight."

"And is it in that category you'd class his love for his father?" asked
the Colonel.

"Of course not; but any unnatural or exaggerated estimate of him is a
great error, to lead to an equally unfair depreciation when the time of
deception is past. To be plain, Harcourt, is that boy fitted to enter
one of our great public schools, stand the hard, rough usage of his own
equals, and buffet it as you or I have done?"

"Why not? or, at least, why should n't he become so after a month or
two?"

"Just because in that same month or two he'd either die broken-hearted,
or plunge his knife into the heart of some comrade who insulted him."

"Not a bit of it. You don't know him at all. Charley is a fine
give-and-take fellow; a little proud, perhaps, because he lives apart
from all that are his equals. Let Glencore just take courage to send him
to Harrow or Rugby, and my life on it, but he 'll be the manliest fellow
in the school."

"I 'll undertake, without Harrow or Rugby, that the boy should become
something even greater than that," said Upton, smiling.

"Oh, I know you sneer at my ideas of what a young fellow ought to be,"
said Harcourt; "but, somehow, you did not neglect these same pursuits
yourself. You can shoot as well as most men, and you ride better than
any I know of."

"One likes to do a little of everything, Harcourt," said Upton, not at
all displeased at this flattery; "and somehow it never suits a fellow,
who really feels that he has fair abilities, to do anything badly; so
that it comes to this: one does it well, or not at all. Now, you never
heard me touch the piano?"

"Never."

"Just becau