He looked forward to the holidays as joyfully as the rest of them. Barnes
and his friend Duscot used to tell him their plans and anticipation; they
were going home to brothers and sisters, and to cricket, more cricket, or
to football, more football, and in the winter there were parties and
jollities of all sorts. In return he would announce his intention of
studying the Hebrew language, or perhaps Provençal, with a walk up a bare
and desolate mountain by way of open-air amusement, and on a rainy day
for choice. Whereupon Barnes would impart to Duscot his confident belief
that old Taylor was quite cracked. It was a queer, funny life that of
school, and so very unlike anything in _Tom Brown_. He once saw the
headmaster patting the head of the bishop's little boy, while he called
him "my little man," and smiled hideously. He told the tale grotesquely
in the lower fifth room the same day, and earned much applause, but
forfeited all liking directly by proposing a voluntary course of
scholastic logic. One barbarian threw him to the ground and another
jumped on him, but it was done very pleasantly. There were, indeed, some
few of a worse class in the school, solemn sycophants, prigs perfected
from tender years, who thought life already "serious," and yet, as the
headmaster said, were "joyous, manly young fellows." Some of these
dressed for dinner at home, and talked of dances when they came back in
January. But this virulent sort was comparatively infrequent, and
achieved great success in after life. Taking his school days as a whole,
he always spoke up for the system, and years afterward he described
with enthusiasm the strong beer at a roadside tavern, some way out of the
town. But he always maintained that the taste for tobacco, acquired in
early life, was the great life, was the great note of the English Public
School.

Three years after Lucian's discovery of the narrow lane and the vision of
the flaming fort, the August holidays brought him home at a time of great