ing of the term Gordon and Tester lolled back in their
comfortable chairs. Gordon was trying to learn his rep. for the exam.
that morning. Tester was reading _The Oxford Book of English Verse_; the
exams for the Sixth were over.

"Oh, damn this," said Gordon. "I can't learn the stuff."

He flung the book down, and lay back watching the first rays of the sun
flicker on the cold bronze of the Abbey.

"This has been a rotten term, you know," he said at last.

"Yes?" said Tester. He was engrossed in poetry.

"Well, I got into the deuce of a row with Chief, and I never got my
House cap, and I've broken it off with Jackson."

Tester put down his book and sat up.

"Caruthers, you know you are wasting your time. Here are you with all
your brilliance and your personality worrying only about House caps and
petty intrigues, and little things like that. What you want to realise
is that there is something beyond the aim of a Fernhurst career. You are
clever enough; but poetry and art mean nothing to you."

"Oh poetry, that's all right for Claremont and asses like that, but
what's the use of it?"

"Oh, use, use! Nothing but this eternal cry about the use of a thing.
Poetry is the sort of beacon-light of man. What's wrong with you is that
you've read the wrong stuff. It is all very well for a middle-aged man
to worship Wordsworth and calm philosophy. But youth wants colour, life,
passion, the poetry of revolt. Now look here, let me read you this, and
then tell me what you think of it."

"Oh, all right. Is it long?"

"No, not very."

In a low, clear voice, Tester began to read the great spring Chorus in
_Atalanta_, into which Swinburne has crowded all that he ever knew of
joy and happiness. In everyone there lies the love of beauty--"we needs
must love the highest when we see it"--but the pity is that so few of us
are ever brought face to face with the really lovely, or perhaps, if we
are, we come to it too late. Our power of appreciation has lain too long
dormant ever to be aroused. And at school it is the common thing for
boys to pass through their six years' traffic without ever realising
what beauty is. They are told to read Vergil, Tennyson and Browning, the
philosophers, the comforters of old age, poets who "had for weary feet
the gift of rest." But boys never hear of Byron, Swinburne and Rossetti,
men with big flaming hearts that cried for physical beauty and the
loveliness of tangible things. As a result they drif