with the world at his feet and with money in his hand to help his father
out of all his troubles.

That was how John Short went to Trinity. It was a hard struggle at first,
for he found himself much poorer than he had imagined, and it seemed as
though the ends could not possibly meet. There was no question of denying
himself luxuries; that would have been easy enough. In those first months
it was the necessities that he lacked, the coals for his little grate,
the oil for his one small lamp. But he fought bravely through it, having,
like many another young fellow who has weathered the storms of poverty in
pursuit of learning, an iron constitution, and an even stronger will. He
used to say long afterwards that feeling cold was a mere habit and that
when one thoroughly understood the construction of Greek verses, some
stimulus of physical discomfort was necessary to make the imagination
work well; in support of which assertion he said that he had never done
such good things by the comfortable fire in the study at Billingsfield
vicarage as he did afterwards on winter nights by the light of a tallow
candle, high up in Neville's Court. Moreover, if any one argued that it
was better for an extremely poor man not to go to Trinity, but to some
much smaller college, he answered that as far as he himself was concerned
he could not have done better, which was quite true and therefore
perfectly unanswerable. Where the competition was less, he would have
been satisfied with less, he said; where it was greatest a man could only
be contented when he had reached the highest point possible. But before
he attained his end he suffered more than any one knew, especially during
those first months. For when he had got his first scholarship, he
insisted upon sending back the little sums of hard-earned money his
father sent him from time to time, and he consequently had nearly as hard
work as before to keep himself warm and to keep oil in his lamp during
the long winter's evenings. But he succeeded, nevertheless.