Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/47

 to a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" which he had begun to read because he had thought it might be a fairy tale. He had never lost his love for fairy tales.

  "Pass Matriculation and Third Certificate Class," of which Don was a member, had now entered on the Spring term that was to end in the dreaded government examination for admission to the Provincial University; and Don was working like a slave. Even his Saturdays he gave up to study, and took his walks with a text-book in his pocket, and drew the figures of his geometrical "deductions" with a twig in the earth. He went much further afield than he had in the days when Conroy and he had hunted man-eating tigers in the Park. He had found a ravine, to the north of the town, lying wooded between two bald-top hills that had been sheared for farm land; the sides of the ravine had been left uncut; and in the bottom of it, under the shelter of firs and spruces, a little cool stream ran between its shores of brown pine needles and dead leaves. Here, he read and dreamed and studied, in a happy solitude with his dog, under innumerable green pine branches, among the corded roots of clinging firs, beside the crisp tinkle of little bubbled waterfalls.

Conroy knew the place, but he did not often come with Don—except on a Sunday afternoon when there 