really did seem as though the boy were
inclined to turn over a new leaf.
    When the boys had all come back, and the examinations were over, the routine
of the half year began; Ernest found that his fears about being kicked about and
bullied were exaggerated. Nobody did anything very dreadful to him. He had to
run errands between certain hours for the elder boys, and to take his turn at
greasing the footballs, etc., but there was an excellent spirit in the school as
regards bullying.
    Nevertheless he was far from happy. Dr. Skinner was much too like his
father. True Ernest was not thrown in with him much yet, but he was always
there; there was no knowing at what moment he might not put in an appearance,
and whenever he did show it was to storm about something. He was like the lion
in the Bishop of Oxford's Sunday story, always liable to rush out from behind
some bush and devour some one when least expecting it. He called Ernest an
audacious reptile and said he wondered the earth did not open and swallow him up
because he pronounced »Thalia« with i short. »And that to me,« he thundered,
»who never made a false quantity in my life« - surely he would have been a much
nicer person if he had made false quantities in his youth like other people.
Ernest could not imagine how the boys in Dr. Skinner's form continued to live;
but yet they did and even throve, and strange as it may seem idolised him, or
professed to do so in after life. To Ernest it seemed like living under the
crater of Vesuvius.
    He was himself, as has been said, in Mr. Templer's form, who was snappish,
but not downright wicked, and was very easy to crib under. Ernest used to wonder
how Mr. Templer could be so blind - for he supposed Mr. Templer must have
cribbed when he was school - and would ask himself whether he should forget his
youth when he got old as Mr. Templer had forgotten it. He used to think he never
could possibly forget any part of it.
    Then there was Mrs. Jay; she was sometimes very alarming; a few days after
the half year had commenced, there being some little extra noise in the hall,
she rushed in with her spectacles on her forehead and her cap strings flying,
and called the boy whom Ernest had selected as his hero the
»rampingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-roaringest boy in the whole
school.«