Henry Hart met his son at Belfast, and was so angry, at finding he had been allowed to travel alone that he vowed the lad should never go back to Taunton, and therefore sent him to the Wesleyan Connexional School in Dublin instead. Here his quaint, merry little face, his ready laugh, and above all his willingness to perform any trickery that they suggested, made him a favourite among the boys at once. To the masters he must have been something of a trial, I imagine, with his habit of asking the why and wherefore of rules and regulations and his refusal to submit to them without a logical answer. One day, for instance, when a certain master spoke somewhat sourly and irritably to him, Robert Hart then and there took it upon himself to deliver him a lecture which, in its calm reasoning, was most disconcerting.
"It is wonderful the way you treat us boys," he said, "just as if you were our superior; just as if you were not a little dust and water like the rest of us. One would think from your manners you were our master, whereas you are really our servant. It is we who give you your livelihood—and yet you behave to us in this high-handed manner." That tirade naturally made a pretty row in the school, but the obdurate young orator melted under the coaxings and cajolings of the Governor's gentle and distressed wife, and duly apologized.
The slightest of excuses served to turn him suddenly from a clever, scatterbrained imp of mischief into a serious student. It happened that the whole school met on an equality in one subject—Scripture History. The head of that class, therefore, enjoyed a peculiar prestige among his fellows, and it was clearly understood that a certain Freckleton, a senior and the good boy of the school, should hold this pleasant leadership. What was more natural, since he was destined to "wag his head in a pulpit?" But Robert Hart could not see the matter in this light. Some spirit of contradictoriness rising in him, he thought a little dispute for first place in Scripture would add spice to a naughty boy's school life and both amuse and amaze. So on Sundays, while the rest of the boys were otherwise occupied, he would walk up and down the ball alley secretly studying Scripture.
When the examination day came the whole school was assembled; questions flew back and forth. Now one boy, now another dropped out of the game; at last only Freckleton and Hart were left, the big boy prodigiously nervous, rubbing his hands on his knees, the small one aggravatingly cool and collected. At last the examiner called for a list of the Kings of Israel. Freckleton stumbled. The question passed to Hart, and, while the boys sat tense with excitement, he answered fluently and correctly. The first place was his, and a hearty cheer greeted his unexpected success.
After this little victory the Governor of the school remarked to him:
"Now you see what you can do when you try, Hart; why don't you try?"
Why not, indeed? Here was a new idea. He accepted it as a challenge, took it up eagerly, and from that day on devoted himself to study with an enthusiasm as thorough as sudden. Everything there was to study, he studied—even stole fifteen minutes from his lunch hour to work at Hebrew—till the boys laughingly nicknamed him "Stewpot" and the "Consequential Butt."
The result was that at fifteen he was ready to leave the school the first boy of the College class, and his parents were puzzled what to do with him next. His father considered it unwise to send such a young lad away to Trinity College, Dublin, where he would be among companions far older than himself; and the end of the matter was that he went to the newly founded Queen's College at Belfast instead because that was nearer Hillsborough and the family circle.
He passed the entrance examinations easily, and of the twelve scholarships offered he carried off the twelfth—nothing, however, to what he was to do later. The second year there were seven scholarships, and he got the seventh; the third there were five, and he got the first. He heard the news of this last triumph one afternoon in a little second-hand book-store where the collegians often gathered. It was a gloomy day wrapped in a grey blanket of rain, and he was not feeling particularly confident—his besetting sin from the first was modesty—when suddenly a fellow-student rushed up and said, "Congratulations, Hart. You've come out first."
"What," retorted Hart, astonished, "is the list published already?" They told him where it was to be seen, and he hurried off to look for himself. Quite likely they were playing a joke on him, he thought. But it was no joke after all; his name stood before all the others—though he could scarcely believe his own eyes, and did not write home about it till next day, for fear that the good luck might turn to bad in the night.