r winning the prize; that will be
your getting it through favouritism."

"But they can pray, too," I reminded him.

"If you all pray for it," answered Dan, "then it will go, not to the
fellow that knows most history, but to the fellow that's prayed the
hardest. That isn't old Florret's idea, I'm sure."

"But we are told to pray for things we want," I insisted.

"Beastly mean way of getting 'em," retorted Dan. And no argument that
came to me, neither then nor at any future time, brought him to right
thinking on this point.

He would judge all matters for himself. In his opinion Achilles was a
coward, not a hero.

"He ought to have told the Trojans that they couldn't hurt any part of
him except his heel, and let them have a shot at that," he argued;
"King Arthur and all the rest of them with their magic swords, it wasn't
playing the game. There's no pluck in fighting if you know you're bound
to win. Beastly cads, I call them all."

I won no prize that year. Oddly enough, Dan did, for arithmetic; the
only subject studied in the Lower Fourth that interested him. He liked
to see things coming right, he explained.

My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me
himself.

"It's very curious, Paul," he said, "you seem to know a good deal."

"They asked me all the things I didn't know. They seemed to do it on
purpose," I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father crossed
the room and sat down beside me.

"Spud!" he said--it was a long time since he had called me by that
childish nickname--"perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the
unlucky ones."

"Are you unlucky?" I asked.

"Invariably," answered my father, rumpling his hair. "I don't know why.
I try hard--I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It always
does."

"But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune," I said,
looking up in surprise. "We're getting on, aren't we?"

"I have thought so before, so often," said my father, "and it has always
ended in a--in a collapse."

I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to
another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.

"You see, when I married your mother," he went on, "I was a rich man.
She had everything she wanted."

"But you will get it all back," I cried.

"I try to think so," he answered. "I do think so--generally speaking.
But there are times--you would not understand--they come to you."

"But she is hap