It was clear, on a survey, that they could not send the boys either to a higher school or to a University. How, then, were they to acquire that considerable store of general knowledge required of the legal apprentice?
David had done well under Evans’s faithful tuition. He had advanced into the higher mathematics; he had read a certain amount of history; he had now mastered the elements of French and Latin.
But much more was required if he was to pass that first obstruction in the great obstacle race set before the novice in the law—the Preliminary Examination. He must, for instance, know more French. He must read Cæsar and Sallust. The village dominie could not carry David as far as that.
Here seemed a formidable gulf to bridge. Less formidable barriers have closed careers to others and driven them back into the workshop.
But human love can leap over great obstacles; and Richard Lloyd was no ordinary man. He knew neither French nor Latin. Very well, he would set out to learn them.
So together the uncle and the nephew started into the unexplored. Hand in hand, they tackled the Latin and the French grammars, and thumbed the dictionaries. For this great-hearted man knew that if both be ignorant of the way it is better to go together. Company gives courage. So in the dark winter evenings, with the light of a candle, they together spelt out the sentences of Cæsar and Sallust and laboriously read Æsop in French. I will warrant that those lessons in Latin and French were not wasted. I even doubt sometimes whether the class-rooms of Eton or Harrow, with their picked teachers, can show anything so inspiring as this little village study—the uncle and nephew struggling along that unknown path, lit only by zeal and affection. May it not be, perhaps, that the accident of this laborious schooling gave a special nourishment to the boy’s instinct of self-confidence, proved more potent than the spoon-feeding of some well-endowed college?
At any rate, this common struggle for knowledge gave the uncle a new insight into his nephew’s powers. From this time onward the boy became his very special “Di”—the darling of his heart—the apple of his eye. He began to perceive that there were few things impossible for this boy to achieve.
At last this astonishing experiment in coaching came to an end. But his uncle was determined to stand by the nephew to the end in the first great trial of his life.
In December, 1877, he accompanied him to Liverpool, where the examination was to take place. Every morning—as he often told in later life—Richard Lloyd accompanied the youth to the examination room in St. George’s Hall; and every evening, after the day’s work, he met him on the steps of the hall and went home with him.
The examination lasted a week. Suspense was followed by triumph. David passed.