rming. A few days
after the half year had commenced, there being some little extra noise in
the hall, she rushed in with her spectacles on her forehead and her cap
strings flying, and called the boy whom Ernest had selected as his hero
the "rampingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-roaringest boy in the
whole school." But she used to say things that Ernest liked. If the
Doctor went out to dinner, and there were no prayers, she would come in
and say, "Young gentlemen, prayers are excused this evening"; and, take
her for all in all, she was a kindly old soul enough.

Most boys soon discover the difference between noise and actual danger,
but to others it is so unnatural to menace, unless they mean mischief,
that they are long before they leave off taking turkey-cocks and ganders
_au serieux_. Ernest was one of the latter sort, and found the
atmosphere of Roughborough so gusty that he was glad to shrink out of
sight and out of mind whenever he could. He disliked the games worse
even than the squalls of the class-room and hall, for he was still
feeble, not filling out and attaining his full strength till a much later
age than most boys. This was perhaps due to the closeness with which his
father had kept him to his books in childhood, but I think in part also
to a tendency towards lateness in attaining maturity, hereditary in the
Pontifex family, which was one also of unusual longevity. At thirteen or
fourteen he was a mere bag of bones, with upper arms about as thick as
the wrists of other boys of his age; his little chest was
pigeon-breasted; he appeared to have no strength or stamina whatever, and
finding he always went to the wall in physical encounters, whether
undertaken in jest or earnest, even with boys shorter than himself, the
timidity natural to childhood increased upon him to an extent that I am
afraid amounted to cowardice. This rendered him even less capable than
he might otherwise have been, for as confidence increases power, so want
of confidence increases impotence. After he had had the breath knocked
out of him and been well shinned half a dozen times in scrimmages at
football--scrimmages in which he had become involved sorely against his
will--he ceased to see any further fun in football, and shirked that
noble game in a way that got him into trouble with the elder boys, who
would stand no shirking on the part of the younger ones.

He was as useless and ill at ease with cricket as with footb