Why not, indeed? Here was a new idea. He accepted it as a challenge,
took it up eagerly, and from that day on devoted himself to study with
an enthusiasm as thorough as sudden. Everything there was to study,
he studied--even stole fifteen minutes from his lunch hour to work
at Hebrew--till the boys laughingly nicknamed him "Stewpot" and the
"Consequential Butt."

The result was that at fifteen he was ready to leave the school the
first boy of the College class, and his parents were puzzled what to
do with him next. His father considered it unwise to send such a
young lad away to Trinity College, Dublin, where he would be among
companions far older than himself; and the end of the matter was
that he went to the newly founded Queen's College at Belfast instead
because that was nearer Hillsborough and the family circle.

He passed the entrance examinations easily, and of the twelve
scholarships offered he carried off the twelfth--nothing, however,
to what he was to do later. The second year there were seven
scholarships, and he got the seventh; the third there were five, and
he got the first. He heard the news of this last triumph one afternoon
in a little second-hand book-store where the collegians often
gathered. It was a gloomy day wrapped in a grey blanket of rain, and
he was not feeling particularly confident--his besetting sin from the
first was modesty--when suddenly a fellow-student rushed up and said,
"Congratulations, Hart. You've come out first."

"What," retorted Hart, astonished, "is the list published already?"
They told him where it was to be seen, and he hurried off to look for
himself. Quite likely they were playing a joke on him, he thought. But
it was no joke after all; his name stood before all the others--though