So sometimes these old tumults came upon him; yet came less frequently, and the less frequently they came were with less suffering escaped. Now, in their onsets, was for the first time a way of refuge from them. Where formerly he had been utterly abandoned to them, sinking more and more deeply within them at every cry of his despair, now was a knowledge that they could be lost; and quicker and more strongly a conscious grasp at what should lose them and draw him out from their oppression. At first with dreadful effort and often with defeat, gradually with less affliction and with more certain hold, he would attempt to turn his mind from these broodings and fasten it upon his enterprises in the school. There was to be thought out a way of helping Form Two to get the hang of parsing in their English grammar to-morrow; there was the idea of starting the young beggars in a daily class of drill and physical exercises; there was the plan of rummaging among Pennyquick's books to pick out a little library of light reading for the boys and to read to them himself for half an hour each day; there was the thought of how jolly nicely they had responded to his proposal to go through their play-boxes and pick out all the cheap trash he found they had been reading, and of the jokes they had had over the bonfire made from the collection; there was the thinking of other ways in which this complete confidence they gave him could be used for their own benefit; there was--there were a hundred of such preoccupations for his mind, any one of which, could he but fix tenaciously enough upon it, would draw him from the quicksands of his depression and set his feet where strongly they bore him. IV