“It is the necessity of the school, and its virtue, my Kate. Let any one of these wonderful children--wonderful as you thought Sisty himself--stay at home, and you will see its head grow bigger and bigger, and its body thinner and thinner--eh, Mr. Squills?--till the mind take all nourishment from the frame, and the frame, in turn, stint or make sickly the mind. You see that noble oak from the window. If the Chinese had brought it up, it would have been a tree in miniature at five years old, and at a hundred, you would have set it in a flowerpot on your table, no bigger than it was at five,--a curiosity for its maturity at one age; a show for its diminutiveness at the other. No! the ordeal for talent is school; restore the stunted mannikin to the growing child, and then let the child, if it can, healthily, hardily, naturally, work its slow way up into greatness. If greatness be denied it, it will at least be a man; and that is better than to be a little Johnny Styles all its life,--an oak in a pill-box.” At that moment I rushed into the room, glowing and panting, health on my cheek, vigor in my limbs, all childhood at my heart. “Oh, mamma, I have got up the kite--so high! Come and see! Do come, papa!” “Certainly,” said my father; “only don’t cry so loud,--kites make no noise in rising; yet, you see how they soar above the world. Come, Kate. Where is my hat? Ah!--thank you, my boy.” “Kitty,” said my father, looking at the kite, which, attached by its string to the peg I had stuck into the ground, rested calm in the sky, “never fear but what our kite shall fly as high; only, the human soul has stronger instincts to mount upward than a few sheets of paper on a framework of lath. But observe that to prevent its being lost in the freedom of space,--we must attach it lightly to earth; and observe again, my dear, that the higher it soars, the more string we must give it.” PART II. CHAPTER I. When I had reached the age of twelve, I had got to the head of the preparatory school to which I had been sent. And having thus exhausted all the oxygen of learning in that little receiver, my parents looked out for a wider range for my inspirations. During the last two years in which I had been at school, my love for study had returned; but it was a vigorous, wakeful, undreamy love, stimulated by competition, and animated by the practical desire to excel. My father no longer sought to curb my intellectual aspirings. He had too great a reverence for scholarship not to wish me to become a scholar if possible; though he more than once said to me somewhat sadly, “Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read. One slave of the lamp is enough for a household; my servitude must not be a hereditary bondage.” My father looked round for a suitable academy; and the fame of Dr. Herman’s “Philhellenic Institute” came to his ears.