PERCIVAL of course knew nothing, suspected nothing, of the discussion between his elders. But in any case it would not have troubled him for a moment. He had no more apprehension of the future than a horse may be supposed to have of the obstacles over which the hunt is to be followed: he goes to the meet with springy paces and a vague feeling that this is a good day, which may be better still before it ends-for the rest he has a well-bred confidence in the hands that are to guide him. So the entry into school life, uncomfortable and even alarming as it is to many stronger boys, seemed a natural affair to Percival, to be faced with the wary exhilaration proper to all kinds of competition. His heart did not sink even at the parting from his mother. She had travelled with him herself, two days before the term was to begin, and when the moment came for her to leave him alone among that alien company it was he who played the sanguine and consoling part;-a duckling born for the pond, he seemed to her astonishment, rather than the simple chicken she had always thought him. "He has a courage like his father's," she wrote to her

friends. "Like her own," commented Mr Mundy warmly; "a woman of less spirit would have been crying over the discovery that she was no longer indispensable."

Casterby was in many ways unlike the private schools of to-day, with their curriculum and compulsory games arranged in elaborate imitation of the public schools for which they are preparatory. At one of those, Percival, for all his innocent goodwill, would have found himself much more puzzled, much less able to perceive an inherent fitness even in things new to him. The naturalness of Casterby was due to the fact of its evolution; for it was not a ready-made thing of yesterday, nor an imitation of something else. King Edward the Sixth founded it as a Grammar School, with Upper and Lower Divisions, providing education of two different grades but without distinction of social classes; by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become merely a school for the boys of Casterby tradesmen and farmers, among whom might be found from time to time a few younger sons of the neighbouring squires. It was in this small section that the Reverend Ambrose Tanner saw

his opportunity, when he returned to his old school as Headmaster, after a brilliant but disabling career at Cambridge. He boldly handed over to the Lower Master the whole list of plebeian scholars, and developed the Upper Division into a separate school for the sons of gentlemen, of whom in a very short time he had some thirty under his own roof. There, in a dormitory whose windows looked towards Casterby Church, Peroival slept his first night away from home, and woke to see the clock on the west side of the great tower, which had been gleaming in moonlight only a moment before, now marking half-past six on a hard white January morning.

That day his mother left him, and the School returned. The evening passed in noisy tumultuous talk, of which hardly one word in a thousand seemed to concern Percival. He sailed discreetly along under the lee of the three Tanner boys, who had already given him much useful information, and found the water quite as smooth as he could have hoped. But as he lay once more in his narrow bed beneath the window and once more looked drowsily at the moonlit clock, his own name leapt suddenly at him out of a conversation.

"Then what about young Twyman?" asked one low voice in the darkness.

"Oh! he's no weight at all," replied the other. "Better put him at the bottom and let him fight his way up."

"No," said the first, "that won't do; he's going to work with old Ambrose, and he can't have black eyes every week. Besides, I tell you he's quickI saw him running with Brosy Tanner."

"All right," replied the second voice more drowsily. "We'll try him with young Williams. Williams will lick him, but it'll de him good."

Percival's heart was leaping like a kangaroo. He felt coldblooded brutality breathing close to him for the first time in his life, and instinct woke his nerves with animal terror. But another and a stronger instinot turned him from all thought of escape; he panted with a fierce desire to prove himself better than his repute. He did not know "young Williams" by sight: he pictured him as a massive and experienced fighter, but he longed ardently to meet him, and wasted the first hour of the night in highly fanciful anticipations of the trial by battle. He would have been astonished if any one had objected that the champions had nothing to fight about.

The peculiarities which distinguished Casterby from more modern places of education were further illustrated next

day. The School, a sixteenthcentury hall of grey stone, divided into two large rooms for the Upper the Upper and Lower

Divisions, stood opposite to the north door of the church, and only a furlong from Mr Tanner's house. Every morning at three minutes to nine the Headmaster left his private door and took the road, accompanied in very orderly fashion by a bodyguard of the elder of his pupils, the procession being closed by Mr Slingsby, the usher, with a straggler or two. The main part of the Upper Division was already ahead, skirmishing in the school-yard and greeting the half-dozen day-boys who came in from the country round about.

To-day Percy was favoured with a command to accompany the Chief himself. He was pleased, for he already felt much liking for this little man with the big head and ceaseless activity of mind, of whom every one else seemed to stand so much in awe. Certainly to the new boy he was reassuringly kind. "Twyman," he said as they came in sight of the school, "I wonder if you'll be as good a pupil as your father was. Ah! he was a sharp fellow one of the sharpest I ever taught."

The boy's ear was not pleased with the word "sharp," but he understood. He perceived that the sensible, unaffected voice had something something more than geniality in ita faint tone of genuine regret. Through the four years which followed, through all the terrors which he endured from this strange man's volcanic temper, Percy never revolted against him, never doubted that he was his father's friend and his own.

But in many of his new companions he saw that the Headmaster inspired a kind of panic. The moment the approach of the autocrat was spied by the watchers on the low schoolyard wall, it was announced with the cry of "Nix! Nix!" and before Nix himself could enter the building with his bodyguard every other boy was in his place and ready to begin work.

For in case of

To any one better acquainted with schools the scene would have appeared an amazingly old-fashioned one: to Percy it presented itself as merely a larger copy of the interior of a dame school which he had once attended. The room was filled with long desks and benches, warmed by a large stove, lit by high mullioned windows: at one end in a commanding position sat Nix himself, enthroned at a larger desk with a semicircle of seats around it, upon which class after class in turn took their places for judgment and execution. need the two processes were simultaneous: where the frown of this fiery dominie fell there also upon the instant rose and fell the cane which lay always at his right hand, and the weapon being a long one, as often as not two victims smarted where only one had offended. Nor was this the limit of Mr Tanner's capacity. Throughout that large room, where forty boys were working or idling like groups of bees and drones in a single hive, Nix's eye was upon every individual, his ear open to every sound, his attention