CHAPTER V. — BRAINS AND NO BRAINS.
I do say, thou art quick in answers:
Thou heatest my blood.—Love’s Labours Lost.
Kem’ster, as county tradition pronounced what was spelt Kenminster, a name meaning St. Kenelm’s minster, had a grand collegiate church and a foundation-school which, in the hands of the Commissioners, had of late years passed into the rule of David Ogilvie, Esq., a spare, pale, nervous, sensitive-looking man of eight or nine and twenty, who sat one April evening under his lamp, with his sister at work a little way off, listening with some amusement to his sighs and groans at the holiday tasks that lay before him.
“Here’s an answer, Mary. What was Magna Charta? The first map of the world.”
“Who’s that ingenious person?”
“Brownlow Major, of course; and here’s French, who says it was a new sort of cow invented by Henry VIII.—a happy feminine, I suppose, to the Papal Bull. Here’s a third! The French fleet defeated by Queen Elizabeth. Most have passed it over entirely.”
“Well, you know this is the first time you have tried such an examination, and boys never do learn history.”
“Nor anything else in this happy town,” was the answer, accompanied by a ruffling over of the papers.
“For shame, David! The first day of the term!”