But the sound of the clock striking three escaped me; and the clanging echoes of the school clock chiming the quarters struck in vain for me through my open window on that June afternoon: and a quarter past three, half past three, and quarter to four. I may have heard, but I heeded not; my mind was far away. Now to shirk school altogether was an unheard-of thing. You could do it in the early morning and say you were ill, and “stay out” under the protection of the matron, who always certified that you were ill. (Who knows? it might be measles!) But if you shirked afternoon school, it meant probably writing out four books of “Paradise Lost.” A little time after the quarter, the boys’ maid came into my room and asked me whatever I was doing. I was brought back from the Château d’If, and my heart stopped still. I raced downstairs, across the street to the schoolyard, up the wooden stairs into the old Upper School, where beneath the busts of famous old Etonians, our little lessons dribbled on. I found school just over, and oh! miracle of miracles! my absence hadn’t been noticed! In every division there was a boy called the _Præpostor_ whose duty it was to see that every boy was present at chapel and in school (that is to say, in the various classrooms). The office was held for a week by every boy in the division, in turn. If you were absent, he had to find out whether it was due to certified illness or whether you had any other reasonable excuse. If not, your name went in to the Head Master. He hadn’t noticed my absence, nor had the master, and I walked away with the other boys as though I had been there all the time instead of at the Château d’If. I sometimes think that perhaps the spirit of Dumas impersonated me during that hour in Upper School, so that my rapture in reading of Dantès’s escape for the first time might be complete, perfect, and uninterrupted. If Dumas could make one forget the chimes of the school clock at Eton, he could make one forget anything. Another book which has (in addition to many other glorious qualities such as poetry, pathos, and passion) the same riveting power is, to my mind (if you skip the historical dissertations), Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” Mr. Basil Thomson says it is the favourite book of the convicts in Dartmoor Prison, and that they call it “Less Miserable.” It is a favourite book among the Russian peasants also--among those who read and write. So is, as a matter of fact, “Monte Cristo.” Most literary critics say the latter part of “Monte Cristo” is a pity. Not so the Russian peasant, and not I. The proof is in the reading. Whoever heard of anybody not finishing “Monte Cristo,” and stopping halfway, bored? In reading what Mr. Basil Thomson says of the books liked and the books disliked by the prisoners in Dartmoor Prison, I was startlingly reminded of what I had heard and seen myself of the literary taste of the Russian peasants.