And Eccles rose, and with more kindness than I had expected from him, said, “Come, Digby, I 'll go too, for we have both to be early risers to-morrow.” Thus ended my first day in public, and I have no need to say what a strange conflict filled my head that night as I dropped off to sleep. CHAPTER VI. HOW THE DAYS WENT OYER If I give one day of my life, I give, with very nearly exactness, the unbroken course of my existence. I rose very early--hours ere the rest of the household was stirring--to work at my lessons, which Mr. Eccles apportioned for me with a liberality that showed he had the highest opinion of my abilities, or--as I discovered later on to be the truth--a profound indifference about them. Thus, a hundred lines of Virgil, thirty of Xenophon, three propositions of Euclid, with a sufficient amount of history, geography, and logic, would be an ordinary day's work. It is fair I should own that when the time of examination came, I found him usually imbibing seltzer and curacoa, with a wet towel round his head; or, in his robuster moments, practising the dumbbells to develop his muscles. So that the interrogatories-were generally in this wise:-- “How goes it, Digby? What of the Homer, eh?” “'It 's Xenophon, sir.” “'To be sure it is. I was forgetting, as a man might who had my headache. And, by the way, Digby, why will your father give Burgundy at supper instead of Bordeaux? Some one must surely have told him accidentally it was a deadly poison, for he adheres to it with desperate fidelity.” “I believe I know my Greek, sir,” would I say, modestly, to recall him to the theme. “Of course you do; you'd cut a sorry figure here this morning if you did not know it. No, sir; I 'm not the man to enjoy your father's confidence, and take his money, and betray my trust His words to me were, 'Make him a gentleman, Eccles. I could find scores of fellows to cram him with Greek particles and double equations, but I want the man who can turn out the perfect article,--the gentleman.' Come now, what relations subsisted between Cyrus and Xenophon?” “Xenophon coached him, sir.”