More clearly than in any other part of his work, this showed in his model-teaching. This was a species of practical work in which a Normal School student visited a city school, and taught a lesson to a class of living, breathing children, under the eye of an experienced teacher who made a report on the student’s success to the Normal School principal. Many students who were impeccable in the theoretical side of their work broke down badly in model-teaching. One young man in Hector’s year, who had almost overcome a severe case of inherited bad English, lost his nerve and addressed his first class as “youse”. A girl, attempting to tell a class some apocryphal stories about the early musical development of the young Handel, lost her nerve and spoke thirty-seven times of “the harpsichord”, which, as she had never seen or heard the instrument in question, was not altogether surprising. Another girl burst into tears when no child volunteered to answer the first question she asked in a classroom. But not Hector. It was plain at his first model lesson that he was the captain on his quarterdeck. He was a born disciplinarian; that is to say, he never had to mention discipline. He was a born teacher, tireless in explanation, ingenious and ready in example, enthusiastic but not flighty in his approach to his work. Teachers who sent in reports on his model lessons were unstinting in their praise, and one elderly teacher, who had seen generations of neophytes pass through these early tests, was known to have sobbed a little, in professional ecstasy of joy, when describing Hector’s lesson on the Lowest Common Denominator.

His year at the Normal School was a success, qualified only by his unaccountable conduct at the Annual “At Home”—conduct which amounted to public scandal, and for which he never offered any explanation. It was this incident which gave rise to the opinion among his fellow students that Mackilwraith was brilliant, but strange. Nevertheless it was agreed that the school which got him for a teacher would be lucky.

The lucky school was a rural establishment which appeared, to the casual observer, to be planted in the middle of a wilderness. To its pupils, and to people for two or three miles in each direction however, it was in the centre of a thriving and heavily populated area. There was one room, in which children from six to fourteen were gathered, and everything they learned was taught to them by Hector, who was now nineteen. He ruled firmly and well, and it never occurred to him at any time to be at a loss, or to doubt his authority, or to laugh at his own omniscience. He was not as popular as the teacher who had been there before him, because when she found that there was a little spare time at the end of the day, or half an hour to be got through on a Friday afternoon, she had read stories to the children; Hector’s way was to give them arithmetic to do, or to test them in “mental arithmetic”. This amusement consisted of his firing off twenty figures or so, and then demanding the total from a pupil chosen at random. A few pupils loved this; most of them dreaded and hated it. Sometimes he would show off a little; he would permit each child in the class—there were thirty-seven of them—to toss a figure, great or small, at him, and he would add them all together in his head and write the total on the blackboard in huge figures. This was better fun than when the addition was being done by the pupils, but it was not so improving, and it did not happen often.

When his second year came around, Hector had secured his increase in salary from the trustees, and was ready to begin on a vital part of his plan. He was now sending home money regularly to his mother, who continued to live at the manse. He had begun teaching at six hundred dollars a year, and now he was getting seven. His mother received half of this, and the remainder was spent for his board. He clothed himself with money which he received for a summer job of time-keeping for a road-construction company. And in this second autumn, when he was twenty, he set to work to obtain a degree of BA from Waverley University, working extra-murally.

Getting a degree extra-murally has certain decided disadvantages. The first of these is that the student has no one to make him work, and no companionship to lighten his work. The next is that he must take in a great deal of information in circumstances which are, as a general thing, uncongenial to such exercise. The third is that he suffers from a sense of isolation from the centre of learning which he hopes to regard as his Alma Mater, and fancies that those students who are on the spot are gaining insights which are denied to him; his position is comparable to a man who is in a house where a wedding feast is going on, but who is forced to remain in the cellars and suck his portion of the cheer through a long tube. The first and second of these troubles did not bother Hector; he liked work, and could settle down to it as well in his bedroom at the farmhouse where he boarded as anywhere else. But the third concerned him greatly, for he wanted his degree in mathematics and physics, and these are not matters which can be studied alone to best advantage. Therefore Hector got rid of all the things which could be done in isolation in three years of solitary study after school hours. Each spring he would make his way to a village six miles away, where there was a clergyman who was a graduate of Waverley, and while the clergyman snored in an armchair, Hector would square himself to the dining-room table, and write an examination or two. And when he had done as well as he could by this method he gave up his rural school, and went to Waverley for two years of study in the place where study is most easily and most effectively accomplished.

Money was, as always, the problem. He had saved something from his summer jobs, but not enough to carry him through two winters of university study. It was necessary, therefore, that he should find a job which he could combine with university work. He found it, working as a waiter in a restaurant which catered particularly to students, and which used students for most of its lesser staff. There were many students who were, like himself, working their way through the university, and not merely was there no discrimination against them—they were, on the contrary, regarded as especially deserving of commendation. Their courage and determination were undeniable, but it was an unfortunate fact that much of the best that a university has to offer was denied them. When students gathered for conversation, they were working. When the weekend brought a cessation of work at the restaurant, Hector had to spend Sunday deep in his books. When a lecture or a demonstration had particularly stirred his mind he could not take time to pursue that stirring; he had to go and rush orders of coffee and doughnuts to other, less needy students. The determination of the man who works his way through the university is beyond question, but it is not likely that he will get as much from his experience as the student more fortunately placed. He has not time to be young, or to invite his soul.

Nevertheless, he achieved his end, and the glorious day came when his mother saw Hector, as one of an apparently endless line of students, receive his diploma from the Chancellor, and return to the body of Convocation Hall, an indisputable BA. He plunged at once into a summer’s work which gave him the coveted specialist certificate, and with a light heart he bade farewell forever to the teaching of history, spelling, geography–all the trivial subjects which had been part of the routine of a primary school teacher. He had no trouble in finding a position in a small collegiate institute and when, four years later, the post of the head of the department of mathematics at the collegiate at Salterton fell vacant, he applied for it, and was chosen from among twenty aspirants. His cup was full. He had done all that he had meant to do, and he had done it by planning and common sense.