The next day he was to leave the home of his childhood and to begin a new life amongst strangers. Yet dearly as he loved his mother (and good right he had to love her dearly), it was not the thought of parting that wrung that sigh from the boy’s heart. He was thinking of what had just been said about his cousin, James Noble. Walter Grey’s life hitherto had been rather a singular one for a boy. He was born at Geneva, during his parents’ exile for conscience’ sake; and he barely remembered their departure from that friendly city, and his father’s death on the homeward journey. The young widow and her orphan boy were most kindly received in London by the worthy merchant to whom her sister had been induced to give her hand, at a time when every one thought she sorely disgraced her family by so doing. But now the wheel of Fortune had turned so far that good Master Noble, mercer and warden of his craft, had more to spend on the education of any one of his six sons than sufficed Mistress Marion Grey to maintain the state of a gentlewoman in the home of her husband’s ancestors. It was well that she was not obliged to delegate the important task of her only son’s education to any hands but her own. Like many noble women of the sixteenth century, Marion Markham and her sister Lilias had received from their father an excellent classical education. So good a teacher was she, and so apt a pupil did Walter prove, that when at length, distrusting her own powers, she sent him to the vicar of the parish, Sir John Carr, to be examined in Greek and Latin, that worthy gentleman, whose store of learning was not ample, found the scholar of fifteen quite too much for him. He prudently sent him back to his mother with a highly complimentary letter, in which he compared her to Minerva, to Cornelia, and, what was more to the purpose, to the sainted “twelve days’ queen,” her husband’s distant relative. Nor were studies yet more important than Greek and Latin forgotten. Walter was made familiar from his earliest childhood with the Book that his mother held dearer than life, and constant were her prayers that its holy lessons might be written on his heart. Walter had another teacher, moreover, a stern but very efficient one. In the school of poverty he learned self-denial; and well has it been remarked that “the worst education that teaches self-denial is better than the best that teaches everything else, and leaves that out.” And yet, in spite of all, there was one defect—only one, but that a great one—in Walter’s education. The boy had no boyhood. A truly healthful, happy childhood he had enjoyed in its season; for the child dwells in his own little world, safe as the fairy in her crystal globe from the cares and sorrows and most of the dangers of maturity. Almost all the little child really needs is love. Give him _that_, and no matter how poor and bare and narrow his surroundings may be, imagination will make them a kingdom. But it is otherwise when