Even the hours of study were uncertain.

He read when he liked, and his father seemed content with long days of idleness followed by others of application.

It was, indeed, only owing to his love of what he read that the boy learned at all.

Often while he tramped from his home to the village at midday his heart was hot within him with some great thought which had sprung to him from a hastily construed chorus of Euripides.

Sometimes he startled the fishermen when he went with them at night by chanting Homer's rolling hexameters through the darkness while the boat lay waiting, borne gunwale down to the black water with the drag of the net that had been shot.
There was a tacit understanding that Hyacinth, like his father, was to take Holy Orders.