no privacy except such as the great
schoolroom could afford, and there is not much privacy in a room,
however large, which is the common habitation of fifty boys.
Nevertheless, the undaunted Daubeny would choose out the quietest and
loneliest corner of the room, and with elbows on knees and hands over
his ears to shut out the chaotic noises which surrounded him, would stay
repeating the lines to himself with attention wholly concentrated and
absorbed, until, after perhaps an hour's work, he knew enough of them to
enable him to finish mastering them the next morning. Next morning he
would be up with the earliest dawn, and would again set himself to the
task with grand determination, content if at the end of the week he
gained the distinguished reward of being head in his form, and could
allow himself the keen pleasure of writing home to tell his mother of
his success.

When Daubeny had first come to Saint Winifred's, he had been forced to
go through very great persecution. As he sat down to do his work he
would be pelted with orange peel, kicked, tilted off the form on which
he sat, ridiculed, and sometimes chased out of the room. All this he
had endured with admirable patience and good humour; in short, so
patiently and good-humouredly that all boys who had in them a spark of
sense or honour very soon abandoned this system of torment, and made up
for it as far as they could by respect and kindness, which always,
however, took more or less the form of banter. It is not to be expected
that boys will ever be made to see that steady, strenuous industry, even
when it fails, is a greater and a better thing than idle cleverness, but
those few who were so far in advance of their years as to have some
intuition of this fact, felt for the character of Daubeny, a value which
gave him an influence of a rare and important kind. For nothing could
daunt this young martyr--not even failure itself. If he were too much
bullied and annoyed to get up his lesson overnight, he would be up by
five in the morning working at it with unremitting assiduity. Very
often he _overdid_ it, and knew his lesson all the worse in proportion
as he had spent upon it too great an amount of time. Without being
positively stupid, his intellect was somewhat dull, and as his manner
was shy and awkward he had not been quite understood at first, and no
master had taken him specially in hand to lighten his burdens. His
bitterest trial, therefore, was to fa