A SEDULOUS SCHOLAR 



saving Bill of Mr. Willet <which has so little chance 

 of being embodied in an Act). The queer boy, in his 

 transition stage, had taken a cranky turn on the subject 

 of hours. Having made up his mind, on the one hand, that 

 he had an enormous amount of new things to read and 

 assimilate before his fresh start in England / and, on the 

 other, having heard that one hour of morning study was 

 worth <on what authority it matters little now) two after 

 noon, he had invested in a specially ferocious alarum clock. 

 The merciless clamour of this machine drove him out of 

 dreamland daily at a quarter to five ante meridiem / and, 

 strange as it undoubtedly was, it is not on record that 

 he ever failed during that period to obey the summons. 

 There must have been somewhere at the back of so 

 unnatural a submission, of such a persistency in a purely 

 self-imposed and unnecessary discipline, a sort of romantic 

 smack of mediaevalism. . . . The " sedulous escholier " <so 

 warmly commended by Saint Louis) was found awake 

 and already absorbed in his search for lore as returning 

 day began to whiten his window. 



The net result was a couple of hours of really earnest 

 work before it was time to dispatch the morning bowl 

 of cafe au lait and the pain de gruau and hasten to the 

 ascent of Mons Martis, where impatient Mr. Gilchrist 

 looked for his scholar's appearance at eight sharp. It 

 was very special reading English Historya subject with 

 which the cours d'histoire at the Lycee could only deal in a 

 sketchy manner / but the early-rising escholier, greedy of 

 new knowledge, was fortunately helped by the appearance 

 in that year of Green's " Short History of the English 

 People/' and fell under the charm of the captivating work. 



95 



