There was another reason why Mr. Wycherly chose that window for Montagu: the morning sun shone straight through it, and the scholar, always something of a stranger in this chill north, craved all the sunshine he could get for the child. He liked to lean back in his own deep-seated revolving chair, set by the big knee-hole table in the centre of the room, and watch the little stooping figure in the patch of sunshine in the window, laboriously tracing the Greek characters so neatly and carefully. A large-eyed thin-faced boy was Montagu, somewhat sallow, with the round shoulders got during those early studies which he never lost in later life. It was not only during lessons that Montagu sat at his little table: long hours did he spend there on wet days while the wind howled round the little house like a hungry wolf, and the rain battered on the panes like shot—making drawings for himself of the battle in the "great harbour of Syracuse," which he had read about in Thomas Hobbes’s translation. For Mr. Wycherly’s shelves abounded in translations as well as in the "original texts," and although, like most translators, he disagreed with all accepted renderings, yet he encouraged Montagu’s use of them, perhaps that he, himself, might the better, by-and-by, point out where he considered that they failed. These drawings were afterwards bestowed upon Edmund, who would listen to Montagu’s classic stories when they dealt with battles or ships, but who otherwise infinitely preferred Elsa’s more homely legends regarding the doings of "Cockie Lockie and Henny Penny." But there was more than the garden to be seen from Montagu’s window: far away, sharp against the sky line, lay the lion back of Arthur’s Seat, and whenever Montagu raised his eyes from his work to look out, it was there that they rested. And inasmuch as at that time the Odyssey and its hero filled all his thoughts, the great gaunt hill became for him actually that Ithaca long sought and longed for by the many-counselled one: till every sight of it would thrill him with a sense of personal possession and delighted recognition. Sometimes Montagu, looking back into the room, would find his old friend watching him, and the little boy would nod gaily without speaking, smiling the while the confident, comrade smile of childhood, and thinking that, failing Achilles, he would like to look like Mr. Wycherly when he was old. There is always something pleasantly surprising in the conjunction of white hair and very dark eyes and eyebrows, and in Mr. Wycherly’s case the expression of the dark eyes was extremely gentle, the features sharply cut and refined, the whole face of that clean-shaven, regular, aristocratic type, which the Reverend Peter Gloag—half in admiration, half in derision—described as so "intensely Oxfordish." "He has got such a tidy face," Montagu said to his aunt one day.