[Illustration: back of child sitting on bench]
Quaint place, that _Institution_—when one looks back on it from this far end of the road! I think I can breathe its peculiar atmosphere this instant—and see the queer, long, low room, with the beams across the ceiling; the whitewashed walls, covered with highly coloured elementary maps and graphic pictures of the metrical system applied to measures lineal and cubical, solid and liquid, and to the national coinage.... There they are: the six rows of benches and desks, each with its half-dozen youngsters, some elaborately drawing a steel nib, in strokes alternately swelling and slender, over a copybook of bafflingly soft paper, productive of periodical splutters; others reading ‹in earnest or in pretence› a chapter of _Epitome_; others, again, committing, with dumb mouthing, a fable of La Fontaine to memory for to-morrow’s recitation, until such moment as the cracked voice of the courtyard clock striking five should proclaim the hour of release. The usher, ensconced _in cathedra_, at his high desk; a smaller lamp for his especial benefit burning ‹and smelling› by his side; a book before him.—In his own walk he must have passed, methinks now, for something of a dandy, in the cheap line; for he remains associated more with sedulous trimming of nails, with pulling out of curly brown whiskers; with a nervous, tricky settling of collar, tie and cuffs ‹obviously false›, than with anything else.... He yawns amain. He consults his watch, and closes it with a click in the midst of the great silence of the room—the silence made more sensible, rather than disturbed, by the recurrent splutter of a pen-nib, or the turning of a leaf of _Epitome_.
That _Epitome Historiae Sacrae_ was a primer adapted to first year boys—a small buckram-bound book compendized, poetically expurgated, and made in truth singularly attractive to the young imagination—more attractive even, I fancy, than those Fables of La Fontaine and of Florian that, read in the light of “short stories,” were such favourites. It was, by the way, called _Epitome Sacrae_ or even _Sacrae_ pure and simple, in the same manner as the volumes allotted to the two subsequent years were known respectively as _Latinae_ and _Graecae_.