Attached by a drawing-pin to the roof over the wash-hand stand, which—­the room being an attic—­sloped almost dangerously, dangled a Time-Table.  Mr. Lewisham was to rise at five, and that this was no vain boasting, a cheap American alarum clock by the books on the box witnessed.  The lumps of mellow chocolate on the papered ledge by the bed-head indorsed that evidence.  “French until eight,” said the time-table curtly.  Breakfast was to be eaten in twenty minutes; then twenty-five minutes of “literature” to be precise, learning extracts (preferably pompous) from the plays of William Shakespeare—­and then to school and duty.  The time-table further prescribed Latin Composition for the recess and the dinner hour ("literature,” however, during the meal), and varied its injunctions for the rest of the twenty-four hours according to the day of the week.  Not a moment for Satan and that “mischief still” of his.  Only three-score and ten has the confidence, as well as the time, to be idle.

But just think of the admirable quality of such a scheme!  Up and busy at five, with all the world about one horizontal, warm, dreamy-brained or stupidly hullish, if roused, roused only to grunt and sigh and roll over again into oblivion.  By eight three hours’ clear start, three hours’ knowledge ahead of everyone.  It takes, I have been told by an eminent scholar, about a thousand hours of sincere work to learn a language completely—­after three or four languages much less—­which gives you, even at the outset, one each a year before breakfast.  The gift of tongues—­picked up like mushrooms!  Then that “literature”—­an astonishing conception!  In the afternoon mathematics and the sciences.  Could anything be simpler or more magnificent?  In six years Mr. Lewisham will have his five or six languages, a sound, all-round education, a habit of tremendous industry, and be still but four-and-twenty.  He will already have honour in his university and ampler means.  One realises that those pamphlets in the Liberal interests will be no obscure platitudes.  Where Mr. Lewisham will be at thirty stirs the imagination.  There will be modifications of the Schema, of course, as experience widens.  But the spirit of it—­the spirit of it is a devouring flame!

He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the cavity.  The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of instructions from his remote correspondence tutors.  Pursuant to the dangling time-table he was, you would have noticed, translating Latin into English.

Imperceptibly the speed of his writing diminished. “Urit me Glycerae nitor” lay ahead and troubled him.  “Urit me,” he murmured, and his eyes travelled from his book out of window to the vicar’s roof opposite and its ivied chimneys.  His brows were knit at first and then relaxed. “Urit me!” He had put his pen into his mouth and glanced about for his dictionary. Urare?