up for the Diplomatic
Service, the Foreign Office, the Indian Civil, or various branches of
the army. Of these a large proportion enjoyed life but did little else,
and in due course failed in their competitive encounters with the
examiners.

Others were too stupid to succeed, or perhaps their natural talents had
another bent, while the remainder, by no means the most brilliant, but
with a faculty for passing examinations and without any disturbing
originality, worked hard and sailed into their desired haven with
considerable facility, being of the stuff of which most successful men
are made. For the rest, there was the opportunity, and if they did not
avail themselves of it Scoones' was not to blame. It was, and perhaps
still remains, a most admirable institution of its sort, one, indeed,
of which the present chronicler has very grateful recollections.

Among the pupils studying there was a young man named Arthur Thorburn,
an orphan, with considerable expectations, who lived with an aunt in a
fine old house at Queen Anne's Gate. He was a brilliant young man,
witty and original, but rash and without perseverance, whom his
guardians wished to enter the Diplomatic Service, a career in which,
without doubt, had he ever attained to it, he would have achieved a
considerable failure. In appearance he was of medium height,
round-faced, light-haired, blue-eyed, with a constant and most charming
smile, in every way a complete contrast to Godfrey. Perhaps this was
the reason of the curious attachment that the two formed for each
other, unless, indeed, such strong and strange affinities have their
roots in past individual history, which is veiled from mortal eyes. At
any rate, it happened that on Godfrey's first day at Scoones' he sat
next to Arthur Thorburn in two classes which he attended. Godfrey
listened intently and made notes; Arthur caricatured the lecturer, an
art for which he had a native gift, and passed the results round the
class. Godfrey saw the caricature and sniggered, then when the lectures
were over gravely reproved the author, saying that he should not do
such things.

"Why not?" asked Arthur, opening his blue eyes. "Heaven intended that
stuffy old parrot" (he had drawn this learned man as a dilapidated fowl
of that species) "to be caricatured. Observe that his nose is already
half a beak. Or perhaps it is a beak developing into a nose; it depends
whether he is on the downward or upward path of evolution."