perceiving that Father Sobriente, the Principal, regarded him at times
with a thoughtful curiosity that made him suspect that his cousin had
especially bespoken that attention, and that he occasionally questioned
him on his antecedents in a way that made him dread a renewal of the
old questioning about his progenitor. For the rest, he was a polished,
cultivated man; yet, in the characteristic, material criticism of youth,
I am afraid that Clarence chiefly identified him as a priest with large
hands, whose soft palms seemed to be cushioned with kindness, and whose
equally large feet, encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed
leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly--rather than to ostentatiously
crush--the obstacles that beset the path of the young student. In the
cloistered galleries of the court-yard Clarence sometimes felt himself
borne down by the protecting weight of this paternal hand; in the
midnight silence of the dormitory he fancied he was often conscious
of the soft browsing tread and snuffly muffled breathing of his
elephantine-footed mentor.

His relations with his school-fellows were at first far from pleasant.
Whether they suspected favoritism; whether they resented that old and
unsympathetic manner which sprang from his habits of association with
his elders; or whether they rested their objections on the broader
grounds of his being a stranger, I do not know, but they presently
passed from cruel sneers to physical opposition. It was then found that
this gentle and reserved youth had retained certain objectionable, rude,
direct, rustic qualities of fist and foot, and that, violating all rules
and disdaining the pomp and circumstance of school-boy warfare, of which
he knew nothing, he simply thrashed a few of his equals out of hand,
with or without ceremony, as the occasion or the insult happened. In
this emergency one of the seniors was selected to teach this youthful
savage his proper position. A challenge was given, and accepted by