Science was in its infancy, mathematics a subject only to be taken up by those who wanted to obtain a college fellowship.

Latin, however, was considered an essential, and a knack of apt quotation from the Latin poets an accomplishment that every man who was a member of society or aspired to enter Parliament was expected to possess.

Thus Mark Thorndyke's lessons lasted but two or three hours a day, and the school term was a movable period, according to the season of the year and the engagements of the Squire and Mark.

In winter the evening was the time, so that the boy shot with his father, or rode to the hounds, or, as he got older, joined in shooting parties at the houses of neighbors.
In summer the work was done in the morning, but was not unfrequently broken.

Mark went off at a very early hour to drive perhaps some twenty miles with his great chum, Dick Chetwynd, for a long day's fishing, or to see a main of cocks fought or a fight between the champions of two neighboring villages, or perhaps some more important battle.
When Millicent Conyers was ten years old she came regularly into the study, sitting curled up in a deep chair, getting up her lessons while Mark did his, and then changing seats with him while he learned his Horace or Ovid by heart.