nd inquired for authorities, in
which to trace them out, without the least notion of the remarkable
powers he was evincing. She was delighted with the boy; Julius
guided his researches; and he went off to bed as happy as a king,
with his hands full of little dark tarnished French duodecimos, and
with a ravenous appetite for the pasture ground he saw before him.
Lower Canada had taught him French, and the stores he found were
revelry to him.

Cecil's feelings may be better guessed than described when the
return of Mudie's box was hastened that he might have Motley's Dutch
Republic. She thought this studiousness mere affectation; but it
was indisputable that Terry's soul was in books, and that he never
was so happy as when turned loose into the library, dipping here and
there, or with an elbow planted on either side of a folio.

Offers of gun or horse merely tormented him, and only his sister
could drag him out by specious pleas of need, to help in those
Christmas works, where she had much better assistance in Anne and
the curates--the one for clubs and coals, the other for decorations.

Mrs. Poynsett was Terry's best friend. He used to come to her in
the evening and discuss what he had been reading till she was almost
as keen about his success as Frank's. He talked over his ambition,
of getting a scholarship, becoming a fellow, and living for ever
among the books, for which the scanty supply in his wandering
boyhood had but whetted his fervour. He even confided to her what
no one else knew but his sister Aileen, his epic in twenty-four
books on Brian Boromhe and the Battle of Clontarf; and she was
mother enough not to predict its inevitable fate, nor audibly to
detect the unconscious plagiarisms, but to be a better listener than
even Aileen, who never could be withheld from unfeeling laughter at
the touching fate of the wounded warriors who were tied to stakes
that they might die fighting.

Tom was a more ordinary youth, even more lazy and quiet in the
house, though out of it he amazed Frank and Charlie by his dash,
fire, and daring, and witched all the stable-world with noble
horsemanship. Hunting was prevented, however, by a frost, which
filled every one with excitement as to the practicability of
skating.

The most available water was a lake between Sirenwood and Compton;
and here, like eagles to the slaughter, gathered, by a sort of
instinct, the entire skating population of the neighbourhood on the
fir