All which means that Mr. Harrison was making a very interesting experiment, and that his system happened to succeed in the case of Robert Boyle. The boy learned his “scholar’s task” very easily; and his spare hours were spent so absorbedly over the books he was reading that Mr. Harrison was sometimes obliged to “force him out to play.” And what were the books that were read with such zest? It was, Robert Boyle says, the accidental perusal of _Quintus Curtius_ that first made him in love with “other than pedantick books”; and in after life he used to assert that he owed more to _Quintus Curtius_ than ever Alexander did: that he had gained more from the history of Alexander’s conquests than ever Alexander had done from the conquests themselves.[46] His other recollections of his Eton schooldays are for the most part of accidents that happened to him there. He was not so good a horseman as his brother Frank. Once he fell from his horse, and the animal trod so near to his throat as to make a hole in his neckband, “which he long after preserved for a remembrance.” Another time his nag took fright as he was riding through a town, and reared upright on his hinder feet against a wall; and the boy just saved himself by slipping off. Yet a third time he nearly met his death by a “potion” given him “by an apothecary’s error”; and it is interesting, in the light of what happened and did not happen in Boyle’s later life, to hear that “this accident made him long after apprehend more from the physicians than the disease, and was possibly the occasion that made him afterwards so inquisitively apply himself to the study of physick, that he might have the less need of them that profess it.”[47] The fourth and last of this almost Pauline enumeration of disasters was the falling, one evening, of the greater part of the wall of the boys’ bedroom in Mr. Harrison’s house. The two brothers had gone early to their room; Robyn was already tucked into the big four-post bed, with its “feather bedd, boulster, and two pillows,” and the curtains of “blew perpetuana with lace and frenge”,[48] and Frank was talking with some other boys round the fire when, without a moment’s warning, the wall of the room fell in, the ceiling with it, carrying bed, chairs, books and furniture from the room above. A bigger boy rescued Frank from the debris and dust, the chair in which he had been sitting broken to pieces, and his clothes torn off his back; and Robyn, the future chemist, peeping from the blew-perpetuana curtains, remembered to wrap his head in the sheet, so that it might serve “as a strainer, through which none but the purer air could find a passage.”