"When yellow-locked and crystal-eyed,
I dreamed green woods among
* * * * *
O, then the earth was young"
—ISABELLA VALANCEY CRAWFORD.
When Chrysler went up to his bedchamber he found the following on a table between two candles:—
BOOK OF ENTHUSIASMS.
Narrative of Chamilly d'Argentenaye Haviland.
At the Friars' School at Dormillière, racing with gleeful playmates around the shady playground, or glibly reciting frequent "Paters" and "Ave Marias," other ideas of life scarce ever entered my head; till one day my father spoke, out of his calm silence, to my grandmother; and with the last of his two or three sentences, "I don't destine him for a Thibetan prayer-mill," (she had fondly intended me for the priesthood) he sat down to a letter, the result of which was that I found myself in a week at the Royal Grammar School at Montreal. Here, where the great city appeared a wilderness of palaces and the large School an almost universe of youthful Crichtons whose superiorities seemed to me the greater because I knew little of their English tongue, the contrasts with my rural Dormillière were so striking and continual that I was set thinking by almost every occurrence.
A French boy is nothing if not imaginative. The time seemed to me a momentous epoch big with the question: "What path shall I follow?"
I admired the prize boys who were so clever and famous. I took a prize myself, and felt heaven in the clapping.
I admired those equally who were skilled at athletics. I saw a tournament of sports and envied the sparkling cups and medals.
These,—to be a brilliant man of learning and an athlete—seemed to me the two great careers of existence!