As young Warricombe had foreseen, the seats obtainable were none too advantageous; only on one of the highest rows of the amphitheatre could they at length establish themselves.

’Buckland will enjoy the more attention when he marches down to take his prizes,’ observed the father.  ’He must sit at the end here, that he mayn’t have a struggle to get out.’

‘Don’t, Martin, don’t!’ urged his wife, considerately.

‘Oh, it doesn’t affect me,’ said Buckland, with a laugh.

’I feel pretty sure I have got the Logic and the Chemistry, and those are what I care most about.  I dare say Peak has beaten me in Geology.’

The appearance in the lower part of the hall of a dark-robed procession, headed by the tall figure of the Principal, imposed a moment’s silence, broken by outbursts of welcoming applause.  The Professors of Whitelaw College were highly popular, not alone with the members of their classes, but with all the educated inhabitants of Kingsmill; and deservedly, for several of them bore names of wide recognition, and as a body they did honour to the institution which had won their services.  With becoming formality they seated themselves in face of the public.  On tables before them were exposed a considerable number of well-bound books, shortly to be distributed among the collegians, who gazed in that direction with speculative eyes.

Among the general concourse might have been discovered two or three representatives of the wage-earning multitude which Kingsmill depended upon for its prosperity, but their presence was due to exceptional circumstances; the College provided for proletarian education by a system of evening classes, a curriculum necessarily quite apart from that followed by the regular students.  Kingsmill, to be sure, was no nurse of Toryism; the robust employers of labour who sent their sons to Whitelaw—­either to complete a training deemed sufficient for an active career, or by way of transition-stage between school and university—­were for the most part avowed Radicals, in theory scornful of privilege, practically supporters of that mode of freedom which regards life as a remorseless conflict.  Not a few of the young men (some of these the hardest and most successful workers) came from poor, middle-class homes, whence, but for Sir Job’s foundation, they must have set forth into the world with no better equipment of knowledge than was supplied by some ‘academy’ of the old type:  a glance distinguished such students from the well-dressed and well-fed offspring of Kingsmill plutocracy.  The note of the assembly was something other than refinement; rather, its high standard of health, spirits, and comfort—­the characteristic of Capitalism.  Decent reverence for learning, keen appreciation of scientific power, warm liberality of thought and sentiment within appreciable limits, enthusiasm for economic, civic, national ideals,—­such attributes were abundantly discoverable in each serried