ndlady brought
up his dinner, which he swallowed hastily that he might return to the
spells of his enchantress!

CHAPTER V. THE COMPETITION.

I could linger with gladness even over this part of my hero's history.
If the school work, was dry it was thorough. If that academy had no
sweetly shadowing trees; if it did stand within a parallelogram of low
stone walls, containing a roughly-gravelled court; if all the region
about suggested hot stones and sand--beyond still was the sea and the
sky; and that court, morning and afternoon, was filled with the shouts
of eager boys, kicking the football with mad rushings to and fro,
and sometimes with wounds and faintings--fit symbol of the equally
resultless ambition with which many of them would follow the game
of life in the years to come. Shock-headed Highland colts, and rough
Lowland steers as many of them were, out of that group, out of the
roughest of them, would emerge in time a few gentlemen--not of the type
of your trim, self-contained, clerical exquisite--but large-hearted,
courteous gentlemen, for whom a man may thank God. And if the master was
stern and hard, he was true; if the pupils feared him, they yet cared to
please him; if there might be found not a few more widely-read scholars
than he, it would be hard to find a better teacher.

Robert leaned to the collar and laboured, not greatly moved by ambition,
but much by the hope of the bursary and the college life in the near
distance. Not unfrequently he would rush into the thick of the football
game, fight like a maniac for one short burst, and then retire and look
on. He oftener regarded than mingled. He seldom joined his fellows after
school hours, for his work lay both upon his conscience and his hopes;
but if he formed no very deep friendships amongst them, at least he made
no enemies, for he was not selfish, and in virtue of the Celtic blood in
him was invariably courteous. His habits were in some things altogether
irregular. He never went out for a walk; but sometimes, looking up from
his Virgil or his Latin version, and seeing the blue expanse in the
distance breaking into white under the viewless wing of the summer wind,
he would fling down his dictionary or his pen, rush from his garret, and
fly in a straight line, like a sea-gull weary of lake and river, down
to the waste shore of the great deep. This was all that stood for the
Arabian Nights of moon-blossomed marvel; all the rest was Aberdeen days