I returned home from the Academy for my vacation with much pleasure. I looked forward to the quiet rambles in the forest, the collecting specimens of natural history, and the general peaceful nature of the life there, as a pleasant change after Woolwich. I also felt some pride in going home after so successful an examination, for it was successful even for the Academy. I thought of the satisfaction I should have in meeting Howard and in telling him of the past half-year’s events. I plotted many amusements for the vacation, but determined to devote a certain amount of time to mathematics and gaining some knowledge of the subjects I should have to study next half.
I was beginning conic sections in the third half-year, and this subject I found was one that I could manage very well by thinking quietly over. I could, in imagination, make my section of the cone and get my co-ordinates very easily without pencil or paper; and more than once I hit off laws that I imagined at first were real discoveries, but I soon found out other men had long since discovered them. This fact, however, showed me that I was on the right road, and that the training of my mind must be going on satisfactorily.
Of all the schemes that I had proposed to carry out during the half-year not one had led in the least to prepare me for an event which for a considerable time produced much effect upon me.
I was much given to long rambles in the forest, and would often take a seat in some retired glen and dream the idle hours away. As I was sitting thus one day I heard some voices near me—one that of a female. I jumped up, surprised at so unusual a sound, for I was out of the regular beat of picnics, and then heard an altercation going on, evidently between a female and an unruly boy. Moving through the furze outside the glade I came suddenly on a young lady, who was trying to pull back a boy of about ten years old. The young lady was fair, and of middle height, and to me seemed quite lovely. She was dressed in a light summer dress, a straw hat, with a wreath of natural ivy round it, and a light-blue scarf. As I came near she said, “Walter, you stupid boy, I know it’s a viper, and it will sting you to death!”
“You donkey!” replied the youth, as he struggled to get free, “it’s only a common snake, and I want it to take to school next half.”
These remarks fully explained to me the cause of the dispute between the youth and the lady; and as the question was one of importance I at once jumped forward, and there saw a full-grown vicious-looking viper on the ground close to the boy. In an instant I struck it with my stick, and broke its back, and said, “I tell you what, youngster, before you call people donkeys you ought to know something about what you are talking of. That thing is a viper, and if you had touched it you would have been poisoned by its bite, and probably would have died.”
“Oh, but I thought it was only a snake!” said the youth, with that air of unmistakable self-satisfaction which at once indicates the unlicked cub.
“I told you it was a viper, Walter,” said the young lady in a conciliatory tone.
“Oh, but you know nothing about it,” replied the youth.