- which is
still excessively bad - I fancy that I can discern some faint symptoms of
improvement.« Ernest says that if the exercise was any better it must have been
by a fluke. I suppose these were the Alcaics he was referring to when he told me
he had not gone inside the hospice when he visited the Great St. Bernard in
after years.
    »As I look back upon it,« he said to me but the other day with a hearty
laugh, »I respect myself more for having never once got the best mark for an
exercise than I should do if I had got it every time it could be got. I am glad
nothing could make me do Latin and Greek verses - I am glad Skinner could never
get any moral influence over me; I am glad I was idle at school, and I am glad
my father overtasked me as a boy - otherwise, likely enough I should have
acquiesced in the swindle, and might have written as good a copy of Alcaics
about the dogs of the monks of St. Bernard as my neighbours, and yet I don't
know, for I remember there was another boy, who sent in a Latin copy of some
sort, but for his own pleasure he wrote the following -
 
The dogs of the monks of St. Bernard go
To pick little children out of the snow,
And round their necks is the cordial gin
Tied with a little bit of bob-bin.
 
I should have liked to have written that, and I did try, but I couldn't. I
didn't quite like the last line, and tried to mend it, but I couldn't.«
    I fancied I could see traces of bitterness against the instructors of his
youth in Ernest's manner, and said something to this effect.
    »Oh no,« he replied, still laughing, »no more than St. Anthony felt towards
the devils who had tempted him, when he met some of them casually a hundred or a
couple of hundred of years afterwards. Of course he knew they were devils, but
that was all right enough; there must be devils. St. Anthony probably liked
these devils better than most others, and, for old acquaintance sake, shewed
them as much indulgence as was compatible with decorum.
    Besides, you know,« he added, »it was St. Anthony who tempted the devils
quite as much as they who tempted him; for his peculiar sanctity was a greater
temptation to tempt him than they could stand. Strictly speaking it was the
devils who were the more to