s hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my
companions and myself went out with the very first, and had the full
benefit of every possible groan and bad language." But the police
cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape
unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so
that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill of
expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob. "I never
before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of nobody," he wrote.

Outside as inside the works, he was "pretty merry and well-to-do,"
zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness
to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,
"working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek
architectural proportions": a business after Fleeming's heart, for he
was never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and
science. This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love
and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the
greatest, from the _Agamemnon_ (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to
the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his
familiar phrase: "The Greeks were the boys." Dr. Bell--the son of
George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and, though he made less use
of it than some, a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race--had
hit upon the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave
the proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's
direction, applied the same method to the other orders, and again found
the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but
the discovery was never given to the world, perhaps because of the
dissensions that arose between the authors. For Dr. Bell believed that
"these intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of,
the antagonistic forces at work"; but his pupil and helper, with
characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted
the discovery as "a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as
might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical, and in no way
connected with any laws of either force or beauty." "Many a hard and
pleasant fight we had over it," wrote Jenkin, in later years; "and
impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the
arguments of the master." I do not know about th