A slap on the back awoke him, and turning round, he saw the genial, good-humoured face of one of his fellow-monitors, Hugh Lillyston.
“Well, Julian, dreaming as usual—castle-building, and all that sort of thing, eh?”
“No; I was thinking how soon one will have to bid good-bye to dear old Harton. How well the chapel looks from here, doesn’t it?—and the church towering above it.”
“The chapel being like a fair daughter seated at her mother’s feet, as your poetical tutor remarked the other day. Well, Julian, I’m glad we shall leave together, anyhow. Come and have some tea.”
Julian went to his friend’s room. The fag brought the tea and toast, and they spent a merry evening, chatting over the speeches, and the way in which the day had gone off. At lock-up, Julian went to write some letters, and then feeling the melancholy thought of future days stealing over him, he plunged into a book of poems till it was bed-time, being disturbed a good deal, however, by the noisy mirth which resounded long after forbidden hours from Bruce’s study overhead. Bruce was also to leave Harton in a month, and they were going up together to Saint Werner’s College, Camford. But the difference was, that Bruce went up wealthy and popular; Julian, whose retiring disposition and refined tastes won him far fewer though truer friends, was going up as a sizar, with no prospect of remaining at the University unless he won himself the means of doing so by his own success. It was this thought that had made him sigh.
Chapter Two.
Julian Home.
“O thou goddess,
Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon’st
In these two princely boys; they are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing beneath the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as fierce,
Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind
That by the top doth take the mountain pine,
And makes him bow to the vale.”
Cymbeline, Act 4, scene 2.