Mr. Flaggon had come to Chiltern with a determination to do great things for education. He himself had had a hard struggle to win to knowledge, and the phases of the struggle had left their mark deeply imprinted on his character. Born with a thirst for knowledge, he had had to force his way, step by step, to the fountain head; and the narrow circumstances of a Cumberland vicarage had strewn the path with difficulties. Old and musty books spelled out by candlelight in his father’s study, then a scholarship at a decaying provincial grammar school, and finally a classical exhibition at a small Oxford College--such had been the stages by which he had made his way up the stream. And, when he reviewed the past, he could not but remember how brackish and unsatisfying the water had often been in the channels where he had been compelled to seek it. If his thirst had been less insatiable, his own experiences might well have cured him of the desire to drink. To a childhood spent among the Cumbrian Fells he owed a robust constitution and a toughness of fibre that defied fatigue; perhaps, too, a certain gravity and reticence which seem to come naturally to those who are bred among mountains. Rather below middle height, with a clear-cut face and an intellectual forehead, his most striking feature was his eyes--fearless, grey, receptive eyes, which looked out upon the world with a quiet but penetrating interest. A friend, who knew him intimately, described them as seeing, rather than speaking, eyes. Of public schools he knew nothing from the inside, and he had few opportunities of studying public school men at his own small college. In such as he came across he had noted a certain self-sufficiency and polite lack of interest in things intellectual, which he put down to the narrowness of their training. The circumstances of his own upbringing had thrown him almost entirely among boys and men who had to make their own way in the world, and who were desperately intent on turning even half a talent to profitable use. Their aims might be low and their ambitions sordid, but there was no trifling with opportunity, no deliberate rejection of golden chances. He had had no practical experience of that large and wealthy class of people who have been well off for two generations and whose children are born with an assured future--the people, in fact, who send their boys to the richer public schools; and he had yet to learn how paralysing to the intellectual life an assured future may be. In a word, he did not yet understand the psychology of the horse who refuses to drink when taken to the water; and, noticing that public school men were, as a class, unintellectual, he assumed that their minds had been starved, and that their teachers set no store by intellect.