Throughout my night-watch I had been free of it, as one who walks
meditating in cloisters on a sentence that once issued from divine lips.
There was no relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest
laughter a chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits
raised for war, going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate
shoulders, and feet of distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze
a rhythmical drill-sergeant. I exulted at the first reading, shuddered
at the second, and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat
staring at vacancy as if I had now lost the power of speech.

At last I flung away idleness and came to a good resolution; and I
carried it through. I studied at a famous German university, not far
from Hanover. My father, after discussing my project with me from the
point of view of amazement, settled himself in the University town, a
place of hopeless dulness, where the stones of the streets and the houses
seemed to have got their knotty problem to brood over, and never knew
holiday. A fire for acquisition possessed me, and soon an ungovernable
scorn for English systems of teaching--sound enough for the producing of
gentlemen, and perhaps of merchants; but gentlemen rather bare of graces,
and merchants not too scientific in finance. Mr. Peterborough conducted
the argument against me until my stout display of facts, or it may have
been my insolence, combined with the ponderous pressure of the atmosphere
upon one who was not imbibing a counteracting force, drove him on a tour
among German cathedrals.

Letters from Riversley informed me that my proceedings were approved,
though the squire wanted me near him. We offered entertainments to the
students on a vast scale. The local newspaper spoke of my father as the
great Lord Roy. So it happened that the margravine at Sarkeld heard of
us. Returning from a visit to the prince's palace, my father told me