s a general rule, the best boys are by
no means the most popular.

It was the great delight of Julian's detractors to compare him
unfavourably with their hero, Bruce. Bruce, as a fair scholar and a
good cricketer, with no very marked line of his own--as a fine-looking
fellow, anxious to keep on good terms with everybody, and with an
apparently hearty "well met" for all the world--cut against the grain of
no one's predilections, and had the voice of popular favour always on
his side. While ambition made him work tolerably hard, as far as he
could do so without attracting observation, the line he took was to
disparage industry, and ally himself with the merely cricketing set,
with some of whom he might be seen strolling arm-in-arm, in loud
conversation, at every possible opportunity. Julian, on the other hand,
though a fair cricketer, soon grew weary of the "shop" about that game,
which for three months formed the main staple of conversation among the
boys; and while his countenance was too expressive to conceal this fact,
he in his turn found himself unable to enlist more than a few in any
interest for those intellectual pursuits which were the chief joy of his
own life.

"Home, I've been watching you for the last half-hour," said Bruce, one
day at dinner, "and you haven't opened your lips."

"I've had nothing to say."

"Why not?"

"Because, since we came in, not one word has been said about any human
subject but cricket, cricket, cricket; it's been the same for the last
two months; and as I haven't been playing this morning--"

"Well, no one wants you to talk," interrupted Brogten, one of the
eleven, Julian's especial foe. "I say, Bruce, did you see--"

"I was only going to add," said Julian, with perfect good-humour,
heedless of the interruption, "that I couldn't discuss a game I didn't
see."

"Nobody asked you, sir, she said," retorted Brogten rudely; "if it had
been some sentimental humbug, I dare say you'd have mooned about it long
enough."

"Better, at any rate, than some of your low stories, Brogten," said
Lillyston, firing up on his friend's behalf.

"I don't know. I like something manly."

"Vice and manliness being identical, then, according to your notions?"
said Lillyston.

Brogten muttered an angry reply, in which the only audible words were
"confound" and "milksops."

"Well spoken, advocate of sin and shame;
Known by thy _bleating_, Ignorance thy name,"

thought Julian; but he di