Gerald was now nearly twelve, and he had gained a good deal of rather curious knowledge. He had read much with his father, and more by himself. The books in Mr. Eversley’s library, some of them heirlooms bearing ancient dates, were familiar to him. One advantage too he enjoyed which many boys lack. It had been his father’s practice, when walking with him around the parish, to impart such information as was possible about the natural world. Thus, Mr. Eversley, who was a fair botanist, had taught him the names of all the common wild flowers and the principles of botanical classification. Mr. Eversley was no devotee of natural science, he had rather a distrust of it as tending to infidelity, but he thought the flowers harmless. He had taught him too the names and positions of the stars and something about the illustrious men who had been the founders of modern astronomy, but hardly ever without alluding to the famous epitaph written by Copernicus for his own tomb, or perhaps by another in his honour; and Mr. Eversley, with his scholarly instinct, would point out that the false quantities in the epitaph, much as they were to be regretted in speaking of so great a man, did not affect the true evangelical character of the theology. Gerald, then, was different from most other boys and knew more than they did, but neither his father nor he had as yet thought of the time when his education could not be carried on at Kestercham. Thus it was that the casual remark of the Rural Dean came upon them as a revelation. Rural Deans are important personages in places like Kestercham; their words are as weighty (and sometimes perhaps as ambiguous) as oracles, and the compliment paid by the Rural Dean to Gerald’s ability opened a vista of splendid possibilities before the eyes of Mr. Eversley. He set about cultivating his son’s powers with a new zest. They read together for some hours every day the old classics, Cæsar, Virgil, Herodotus, Sophocles, which gained for Mr. Eversley himself a new and living interest by the rapid interchange of question and answer, and above all Homer, the unfailing well of delight to youthful minds. It was no less a surprise than a happiness to Mr. Eversley to observe with what keenness of appreciative sympathy Gerald entered into the wonderful story of the Odyssey, that story which is to the intellect of every schoolboy what the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ is or should be to his spirit. Mr. Eversley was a believer in Latin versification, not on any theoretical ground, but as somehow creating the indefinable distinction of a ‘gentleman.’ So Gerald, like many another boy, wrote Latin verses, and wrote them better than most boys. Mr. Eversley was a good scholar, but in mathematics he was not proficient, though he succeeded in teaching his son arithmetic and a good part of algebra, and three books of Euclid. Modern languages were not taught in Kestercham vicarage. It came to be understood that