"I should have hated the notion of being Captain," wrote John, "if
those impracticable fellows had stayed on, and if I did not feel sure
of you and Evelyn. You are such a fellow for getting hold of the
others, but with you two at my back, I really think the house may get
a different tone into it."
"And every one told us what an excellent character it had," said Mrs.
Evelyn, when the letter, through a chain of strict confidence, came
round to her, the boys little knowing how much it did to decide their
continuance together, and at Eton. Sir James had never been willing
that Cecil should be taken away, and he had become as sensible as any
of the rest to the Brownlow charm.
That was a very happy time in the pine-woods and the Alp. The whole
of the nineteen copy books were actually read by Babie to Sydney and
Armine; and Lord Fordham, over his sketches, submitted to hear a good
deal. He told his mother that the story was the most diverting thing
he had ever heard, with its queer mixture of childish simplicity and
borrowed romance, of natural poetry and of infantine absurdity, of
extraordinary knowledge and equally comical ignorance, of originality
and imitation, so that his great difficulty had been not to laugh in
the wrong place, when Babie had tears in her eyes at the heights of
pathos and sublimity, and Sydney was shedding them for company.
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