The
gift of tongues--picked up like mushrooms! Then that "literature"--an
astonishing conception! In the afternoon mathematics and the
sciences. Could anything be simpler or more magnificent? In six years
Mr. Lewisham will have his five or six languages, a sound, all-round
education, a habit of tremendous industry, and be still but
four-and-twenty. He will already have honour in his university and
ampler means. One realises that those pamphlets in the Liberal
interests will be no obscure platitudes. Where Mr. Lewisham will be at
thirty stirs the imagination. There will be modifications of the
Schema, of course, as experience widens. But the spirit of it--the
spirit of it is a devouring flame!
He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing
fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the
lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the
cavity. The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of
instructions from his remote correspondence tutors. Pursuant to the
dangling time-table he was, you would have noticed, translating Latin
into English.
Imperceptibly the speed of his writing diminished. "_Urit me Glycerae
nitor_" lay ahead and troubled him. "Urit me," he murmured, and his
eyes travelled from his book out of window to the vicar's roof
opposite and its ivied chimneys.
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