her face on a bit of paper; but he had no skill and he thrust the drawing
into the paper basket, horrified at having made anything so hideous in
the effort to represent anything so beautiful, and returned to making
odes upon her, and Latin epistles, in which he succeeded much better.

And now the time had come when he must leave all this dreaming, or at
least the scene of it, and go to college and win scholarships and renown.
It was hard to go and he showed his regret so plainly that Mrs. Ambrose
was touched at what she took for his affection for the place and for
herself and for the vicar. John Short was indeed very grateful to her for
all the kindness she had shown him, and to Mr. Ambrose for the learning
he had acquired; for John was a fine fellow and never forgot an
obligation nor undervalued one. But when we are very young our hearts are
far more easily touched to joy and sadness by the chords and discords of
our own dreaming, than by the material doings of the world around us, or
by the strong and benevolent interest our elders are good enough to take
in us. We feel grateful to those same elders if we have any good in us,
but we are far from feeling a similar interest in them. We see in our
imaginations wonderful pictures, and we hear wonderful words, for
everything we dream of partakes of an unknown perfection and completely
throws into the shade the inartistic commonplaces of daily life. As John
Short grew older, he often regretted the society of his old tutor and in
the frequent absence of important buttons from his raiment he bitterly
realised that there was no longer a motherly Mrs. Ambrose to inspect his
linen; but when he took leave of them what hurt him most was to turn his
back upon the beloved old study, upon the very door through which he had
once, and only once, beheld the ideal of his first love dream.

Though the vicar was glad to see the boy started upon what he already
regarded as a career of certain victory, he was sorry to lose him, not