ools.

Michael disliked the examination very much indeed. He hated the way in
which all the other competitors stared. He disliked the speed with which
they wrote and the easy manners of some of them. However, he gained his
scholarship mostly by age marks and was put in the Lower Third, the
youngest boy in the class by two years, and became a Jacobean, turning
every morning round the same gate, walking every morning up the same
gravel path, running every morning up the same wide steps, meeting every
morning the same smell of hot-water pipes and hearing every day the same
shuffle of quick feet along the corridors past the same plaster cast of
the Laocoon.

BOOK TWO

CLASSIC EDUCATION

_"What is it then that thou hast got_
_By drudging through that five-year task?_
_What knowledge or what art is thine?_
_Set out thy stock, thy craft declare."_
IONICA.

_"Sic cum his, inter quos eram, voluntatum enuntianaarum signa
conmunicavi; et vitae humanae procellosam societatem altius
ingressus sum, pendens ex parentum auctoritate nutuque maiorum
hominum."_

ST. AUGUSTINE.

Chapter I: _The Jacobean_

Michael found the Lower Third at St. James' a jolly class. He was so
particularly young that he was called 'Baby,' but with enough obvious
affection to make the dubious nickname a compliment. To be sure, Mr.
Braxted would often cackle jokes in a raucous voice about his age, and
if Michael made a false quantity he would grumble and say he was paid as
a schoolmaster not as a wet-nurse. However, Mr. Braxted was such a dandy
and wore such very sharply creased and tight trousers and was so well
set up and groomed that the class was proud of his neat appearance, and
would inform the Upper Third that Foxy Braxted did, at any rate, look a
gentleman, a distinction which the Upper Third could scarcely claim for
their own form-master.

Michael liked the greater freedom of a public school. There were no
home-books to be signed by governesses: there was no longer any taboo
upon the revelation of Christian names. Idiosyncrasies were overlooked
in the vaster society of St. James'. The senior boys paid no attention
to the juniors, but passed them by scornfully as if they were grubs not
worth the trouble of squashing. There was no longer the same zest in the
little scandals and petty spitefulness of a private school. There was
much greater