Thus Val dropped asleep on his last night at home; and he woke in the morning cured of his first trouble, with as light a heart as any schoolboy need have--the shock having gone off with all its consequences, and his mind being too full of his new start, of his new watch, of his long journey--the first he had ever taken--and of Eton at the end most wonderful of all,--far too full of these things to be sad. He gave his grandmother a hug when the moment came to go away. “I’ll be back at Christmas, grandma,” he said, between laughing and crying. The old lord was going with his heir, and this “broke the parting very much, so that he bore up like a man,” Lady Eskside said afterwards, wishing, I fear, that Val had been a little more “overcome.” She shed tears enough for both of them after the carriage had driven away, with a large box of game--to conciliate Mr Grinder--fastened on behind. From the window of one of the turrets she could see it driving across the bridge at Lasswade; and there she went, though the stairs tired her, and waved her handkerchief out of the narrow window, and wept at thought of the dreariness he left behind him. It seemed to my lady that there was not one creature left in the great house, or on Eskside, up the water and down the water, save herself; and thus Val made his first start in life. CHAPTER XIV. The boy was very tired when he arrived in London, and not capable of the hot interest he expected to feel in the great muddy capital, which was one muddle of mean houses, noisy roads, carts and carriages, and crowding people, to his tired perceptions. The day after, he and his grandfather went to Windsor through the mild soft country, half veiled in the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” that distinguish autumn, and warm with the all-pervading and diffused sunshine of the season. How different was the calm slow river, lingering between its placid banks, seeking no coy concealment under cliff or tree, but facing the daylight with gentle indifference, from the wild shy Esk, which played at hide-and-seek with the sunshine, like a flying nymph among the woods! The old lord seemed half inspired by this return to scenes which he remembered so well, though he had not been himself brought up at Eton. “I brought your father here, as I’m bringing you,” he said, as they rolled along round the curves of the railway, looking out upon the distant castle and the river. “You will see plenty of boats on the river in another day, my boy; and if your grandma and I come here next summer, I daresay we shall see you strutting along in all your finery, with flowers in your hat, and a blue shirt.” Innocent old lord! he thought his little rustic, just out of the nest, might reach the celestial heights of Eton in a few months, and perhaps--for what limits are there to the presumption of ignorance?--find a place in the Eight in his first summer. But, indeed, I don’t really think Lord Eskside’s ignorance went so far as this.