“Take less?” repeated the bookseller. “Good gracious, young man, do you know what you’d have to pay for Swinburne’s stuff separate? Something like seven or eight pounds, and then they’d be all in different volumes. Whereas here you’ve got—lemme see—Atalanta in Calydon, Chastelard, Poems and Ballads, Songs before Sunrise, Bothwell, Tristram of Lyonesse, Songs of Two Nations, and heaven knows what not. I call seventeen shillings and sixpence very cheap for what you might almost call a man’s life-work. Shall I wrap it up?” “Yes, please,” said Michael, gasping with the effect of the plunge. But when that night he read _Swallow, my sister, O fair swift swallow,_ he forgot all about the cost. The more of Swinburne that Michael read, the more impatient he grew of school. The boredom of Mr. Cray’s class became stupendous; and Michael, searching for some way to avoid it, decided to give up Classics and apply for admission to the History Sixth, which was a small association of boys who had drifted into this appendix for the purpose of defeating the ordinary rules of promotion. For instance, when the Captain of the School Eleven had not attained the privileged Sixth, he was often allowed to enter the History Sixth, in order that he might achieve the intellectual dignity which consorted with his athletic prowess. Michael had for some time envied the leisure of the History Sixth, with its general air of slackness and its form-master, Mr. Kirkham, who, on account of holding many administrative positions important to the athletic life of the school, was so often absent from his class-room. He now racked his brains for an excuse to achieve the idle bliss of these charmed few. Finally he persuaded his mother to write to the Headmaster and apply for his admission, on the grounds of the greater utility of History in his future profession. “But what are you going to be, Michael?” asked his mother. “I don’t know, but you can say I’m going to be a barrister or something.” “Is History better for a barrister?” “I don’t know, but you can easily say you think it is.” In the end his mother wrote to Dr. Brownjohn, and one grey November afternoon the Headmaster sailed into the class-room of the Upper Fifth, extricated Michael with a roar, and marched with him up and down the dusky corridor in a ferocious discussion of the proposal. “Why do you want to give up your Classics?” bellowed Dr. Brownjohn. In the echoing corridor Michael’s voice sounded painfully weak against his monitor’s. “I don’t want to give them up, sir. Only I would like to learn History as well,” he explained. “What’s the good of History?” roared the Doctor. “I thought I’d like to learn it,” said Michael. “You shouldn’t think, you infamous young sluggard.” “And I could go on reading Classics, sir, I could really.”