The idea of standing for a headmastership had first been suggested to him by an acquaintance whom chance had thrown in his way. After securing his Fellowship, Mr. Flaggon had accepted a post as tutor to a foreign prince, partly because the work was light and he needed a holiday, and partly because the tutorship was a travelling one and he was eager to see something of the world. Ten days of continuous rain and snow on the Riffel Alp had thrown him much into the society of the great man behind the scenes to whom allusion has already been made. The great man was both an enthusiast for education and a firm believer in ability; he even had the hardihood to maintain that ability is of greater value than experience, and experiment more fruitful of results than the accepted method of playing for safety. Being a shrewd judge of men, he soon discerned, beneath the tutor’s quiet and unsensational exterior, signs of exceptional power; and he did not lose sight of him. The Welsh appointment was largely his doing, and, when the headmastership of Chiltern fell vacant, it was he who wrote and suggested that Mr. Flaggon should stand. Mr. Flaggon himself had hardly regarded his candidature even as a forlorn hope. It was intended rather as a _ballon d’essai_, a notice to the scholastic world that he considered himself a possible headmaster, and an opportunity of gauging how that world would regard his claims. Chiltern, as we have seen, had no hesitation in branding his pretensions as presumptuous; and Mr. Flaggon was quite aware that the success of his audacious move, which had come as a surprise to himself, had been more than a disappointment to his future colleagues. But he was not dismayed by the difficulty of the task that lay before him. His whole life had been spent in overcoming difficulties, and he had the quiet confidence of a man who is sure of his own temper and accustomed to succeed. As has been stated before, he brought with him to his new work a great zeal for the cause of education; but he had no cut-and-dried theories of reform, no patent nostrum of his own. He knew what education _ought_ to be, what it had been to himself--an individual renaissance, a quickening of the highest faculties of mind and spirit; and he knew that that was precisely what public school education was _not_. He was determined to study the problem on the spot and to proceed tentatively. The machinery, as he saw it, was antiquated, the bill of fare obsolete, the valley full of dry bones. But the dry bones were only waiting for a revivifying spirit to become clothed with flesh and to start into life again. In his mind’s eye he saw the boys as hungry sheep who looked up and were not fed. He had not yet become acquainted with that particular breed of sheep that is born without an appetite.