Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/72

60 until it has assumed the high intellectual pleasure of roaming through God's great creation, and of confirming the ancient writer's conclusion—"Lo, there is no end to it!"

Of all these things Jack Hampson had never heard a word. Perhaps he had occasionally listened to a few joking remarks about Darwin and our "being descended from monkeys" at his father's dinner-table. But his father (who was anything but a wealthy man these hard agricultural times, although he farmed his own estate) had not much time for considering the discoveries of modern science. Their echoes faintly reached him occasionally, but never touched him seriously. Not only were the times bad, but his family was large, and it was not without a stretch that Jack was sent to Mugby School, rather more than twenty miles off. His brother (Jack's uncle) was better off, because he had no family; and the uncle also had more leisure, and, what is more, was really a man of a literary and scientific turn of mind.

All school-boys make friends at school. Nobody has ever analyzed the process of friend-making among boys. It is as mysterious as genuine love-making. Friendships—at least, boys' friendships—are also made "at first sight." Live in a public school a few years, and you will find it out. You might just as well tell a boy to make friends with a certain other boy, as order him to make love a few years later with your female selection. And yet what issues of life depend on those boyish friendships made at school! They are often more durable than marriages. They survive success, disaster, and disease. Not unfrequently, they are prolonged to the second and third generation. If there