into a
panorama of loveliness. On the road to Parliament Hill he passed the
spot where Shelley found a starving woman dying in the snow, and took
her to Leigh Hunt's house to give her warmth. Near John Masefield's
house was the garden where Keats had written his immortal _Ode to a
Nightingale_. Hampstead was prodigal of associations, and they stirred
the boy's imagination like a trumpet call.

Then followed the long summer term, with its drowsy afternoons, its
white flannels, its long evening shadows creeping across the courts, its
ices, its innumerable lemonades; everything conspired to make Gordon
supremely happy. Scholastically he had at last achieved his great wish
of specialising in history; a fine-sounding programme which actually
implied that he would not need to do another stroke of work during his
Fernhurst career. Specialising in history was an elastic activity, and
might mean a few hours a week in which to read up political economy. It
might mean what Prothero made it mean--seven hours in school a week, and
the remainder pretending to read history in his study.

The grey and lifeless Finnemore superintended the history, and, like
everything else he superintended, it was scandalously neglected.
Outhouse people occasionally did a little work; School House men never.
Gordon began by taking quite modest privileges. He knew he had heaps of
time to enlarge his advantages. He started by doing one prose and one
"con" a week, instead of two proses and two "cons" like the rest of the
form. He also gave up one Latin construe book and one Greek book. That
meant about two hours a day to idle in his study. But he found it quite
easy to turn that two into three, and he was well aware that by
Christmas his daily hours of indolence would have reached five. Prothero
at the present moment was only going into school for divinity and
French, and as often as not he told his French master that he was so
much occupied with history that he could not come to French at all.
Nominally he went into school seven hours a week, actually he very
rarely went in more than three.

The method of teaching history at Fernhurst had been the same from time
immemorial. Gordon was told to buy _Modern Europe_, by Lodge, price
seven shillings and sixpence. He did not, however, put his father to
this expense. History specialists in the School House had for years used
the same book. It had once belonged to a fabulous Van Hepworth, who had
gained a His