ears to learn, and sometimes never learnt at all. It had
taught him to rely upon himself. In the future he would take his courage
in his hands, and work out his own salvation on the hard hill-road of
experience.

The school was just pouring out from the rep. exam. He heard Foster
shouting across the courts.

"Caruthers, you slacker, come up to the tuck-shop."

"Right-o!" he yelled back; and racing across the green jumped the
railings, and went laughing up to the tuck-shop.

"I say, Foster, let's have a big tea this afternoon. We had a supper for
the A-K side on Saturday. Let's have the rest up to-day."

Gordon flushed with excitement at what lay before him. He wanted
everyone else to laugh with him too. An enormous tea was ordered. Men
from the outhouses came down, the tables were drawn up on the V. A
green, and the afternoon went by in a whirl of happiness. They rolled
out arm in arm for the prize-giving. For the last time Gordon saw the
whole staff sitting on "their dais serene." He looked at the row of
faces. There was Rogers puffed out with pride; Christy, pharisee and
humbug, superbly satisfied with himself. Finnemore sat in the
background, a pale grey shadow, that had been too weak to get to grips
with life at all. Trundle nursed his chin, twittering in a haze of
indecision. Ferrers was fidgeting about, impatient of delay. He, at any
rate, was not being misled by outside things; if he was misled by
anything, it was by the impulse of his own feverish temperament. He was
the splendid rebel leader of forlorn hopes, the survival of those

"_Lonely antagonists of destiny_
_That went down scornful before many spears._"

There, again, was Macdonald, with the same benign smile that time could
not change. As he looked at him, Gordon thought that he at least could
not have been deceived, but had too kind, too wide a heart to
disillusion the young. And, above all, sat Buller, a second Garibaldi,
with a heart of gold, an indomitable energy, a splendid sincerity, the
most loyal of Fernhurst's sons. And as Gordon looked his last at his old
foe, he felt that "the Bull" was so essentially big, so strong, so noble
of heart, that it hardly mattered what he worshipped. There hung round
him no false trapping of the trickster; sincerity was the keynote of his
life. Gordon would search in vain, perhaps, for a brighter lodestar. As
two vessels that have journeyed a little way together down a river, on
taking their differ