"And do you know, Mother," Philip declared during his breathless repetition of the day's events, "there was a man there who put us into our classes and he was reading my composition at the scholarship and I thought he was the drilling man but he isn't really, he's the head master, Mr. Furness, and he's like Jupiter, only Jupiter's got a great big black beard and Mr. Furness hasn't and he's not got much on the top of his head either. There's a huge statue of Jupiter..." "To thy soup, Feivel!" said Mrs. Massel, "It will get cold and Mr. Foniss will not come and heat it for thee. Calm then, calm!" she demanded, by no means less aquiver with excitement than the boy. Yet it must be here said that for some considerable time to come, Doomington School had no serious influence upon Philip's real life. There was of course something _genteel_ about the atmosphere compared with the crudities of the Bridgeway Elementary School, and this demanded from Philip a much more rigid discipline in the matter of boots and ties. His master, he was informed, hailed from an Olympian institution called Oxford University, and for this reason wore a sombre black gown which would have made of a less imposing figure than this gentleman an object to be treated with remote awe. Mr. Mathers was distinguished from Miss Tibbet, at least by the fact that he did not wear tortoise-shell spectacles, and from Miss Briggs of the infants' hall, by the fact that the two front teeth of his top jaw were not disproportionate. Yet Philip felt in his presence a combination of the Briggs terror and the Tibbet ennui. There was in him a monomaniac insistence on the correct orders of Latin sentences which produced the sensation half-way during the lesson that the orders of Latin sentences and the orders of the stars in their courses were of like fundamental gravity. Mr. Mathers presented an interesting contrast to little Mr. Costar who taught French, and who sat in his high desk like a little bird twittering on a bough. Twitter--twitter! the notes came, in a sequence of trills not musical but shrill and frequent. Yet sometimes, and without warning, the tree-top twitter would cease, the eyes of Mr. Costar would become glacially severe, some delinquent would be lifted in his beak like a pink quivering worm, the throat of Mr. Costar would vibrate in the processes of swallowing, and immediately the twitter would be resumed, twitter--twitter, shrill, without humour. The boys seemed no less strange and unreal than Mr. Mathers and Mr. Costar. They came mysteriously from townships scattered round the central and gloomy sun of Doomington, and disappeared with their daily quotum of Latin orders and French verbs into the same dim places, beyond the pale of knowledge. There was a community of Jewish boys at Doomington, but he seemed at once only too familiar with their characteristics. They were a blend of Mottele and Barney, Mottele being the predominant element.