mfortable at school nowadays that you miss
one great luxury of return to the domestic hearth. Why, they tell me
that the school-rooms at Harton are _warmed_! And I know that the
Senate House at Cambridge is when men are in for their winter
examinations, so it is probable that the younger race is equally
pampered; and if the present Hartonians' teeth chatter at six o'clock
lesson, consciousness of unprepared lessons is the cause, not cold.

But you have harder head-work and fewer holidays than we had, so you are
welcome to your warm school-rooms. I am not sure that you have the best
of it: at any rate, we will cry quits.

But the superior material comforts of home are but a small matter in the
pleasure of going there after all. It is the affections centred in it
which cause it to fill the first place in our hearts, "be it never so
humble."

Harry Forsyth was fond of Harton; fond of football, which was in full
swing; fond of his two chums, Strachan and Kavanagh. He rather liked
his studies than otherwise, and, indeed, took a real pleasure in some
classical authors--Homer and Horace, for example--as any lad who has
turned sixteen who has brains, and is not absolutely idle, is likely to
do. He was strong, active, popular; he had passed from the purgatorial
state of fag to the elysium of fagger. But still his blood seemed
turned to champagne, and his muscles to watch-springs, when the cab,
which carried him and his portmanteau, passed through the gate into the
drive which curved up to the door of Holly Lodge. For Holly Lodge
contained his mother and Trix, and the thought of meeting either of them
after an absence of a school-term set his heart bounding, and his pulse
throbbing, in a way he would not have owned to his best friends for the
choice of bats in the best maker's shop. He loved his father also, but
he did not know so much of him. He was a merchant, and his business had
necessitated his living very much abroad, while Cairo did not suit his
wife's health. His visits to England were for some years but
occasional, and did not always coincide with Harry's holidays. Two
years previously, indeed, he had wound up his affairs, and settled
permanently at home; but he was still a busy man--a director of the
Great Transit Bank, and interested in other things, which took him up to
London every day. He was also fond of club-life and public dinners;
and, though he was affectionate with his wife and children, too muc