Perhaps on the whole they were none the worse for the want of public–school training. What they lost thereby in quickness, suspicion, and effrontery, was more than balanced by the gain in purity, simplicity, love of home, and kindliness. For nature had not gifted them with that vulgar arrogance, for which the best prescription is “calcitration nine times a day, and clean the boots for kicking you”. Every year their father took them for a month or two to London, to garnish with some courtly frilling the knuckles of his Hampshire hams. But they only hated it; thorough agricoles they were, and well knew their own blessings: and sweet and gladsome was the morning after each return, though it might be blowing a gale of wind, or drizzling through the ash–leaves. And then the headlong rush to see beloved Uncle John. Nature they loved in any form, sylvan, agrarian, human, when that human form was such as they could climb and nestle in. And there was not in the parish, nor in all the forest, any child so rough and dirty, so shock–headed, and such a scamp, that it could not climb into the arms of John Rosedewʼs fellow–feeling. But I must not dwell on these pleasant days, the fatherʼs glory, the hopes of the sons, the love of all who came near them, and the blessings of Mrs. OʼGaghan. They were now to go to Oxford, and astonish the natives there, by showing that a little _hic_, _hæc_, _hoc_, may come even out of Galilee; that a youth never drawn through the wire–gauge of Eton, Harrow, or Rugby, may carry still the electric spark, and be taper and well–rounded. Half their learning accrued _sub dio_, in the manner of the ancients. Uncle John would lead them between the trees and down to some forest dingle, the boy on his right hand construing aloud or parsing very slowly, the little spark at his left all glowing to explode at the first mistake. _Δεξιύσειρος_ made the running, until he tripped and fell mentally, and even then he was set on his legs, unless the other was down upon him; but in the latter case the yoke–mate leaped into the harness. The stroke–oar on the river that evening was awarded to the one who paced the greatest number of stades in the active voice of expounding. The accuracy, the caution, born of this warm rivalry, became at last so vigilant, that the boy who won the toss for the right–hand place at starting, was almost sure of the stroke–oar.