There was no time lost in setting the experiment going, and it was soon in full swing. Its birth pangs were awful, and embraced in their throes a great number of persons. The parents’ sufferings were so complex and so quite peculiar to themselves that it is impossible to expound them to an unsympathizing public.

The tortures that couple endured during the first few months after the initial stage of intellectual development had been instituted and was being dealt with, were severe, but they were in no wise connected with their children’s anguish at the sudden and unexpected onslaught on their higher parts.

Their misery arose chiefly from the jarring and inconveniently close contact with tutors, whom, in their unconscious Christian way, they found it their duty to admit for some part of every day into the edge of their lives. This was a terrible discipline, more especially as during these times the unhappy instructors also thought it their duty to ease off their slough of learning and to expand their social parts, and thus the manufacture of small talk became a daily necessity in the lives of the distracted pair.

They had both taken infinite pains to provide silent entertainment for their guests—or rather succession of guests—in the tutoring line. The standard scientists were first tried, and these seeming to have but little effect, a whole cartload of mixed literature, including all the rag-tag and bobtail of fiction the bookseller wanted to get off his hands, was imported and spread about enticingly; theology and ethics were also given a show, till at last all the tables at one side of the room were spotted with slate, yellow, and dull blues and browns, and every form of journal from the Times to the Police News was scattered broadcast over the place, all with a view to lay hold on the tutorial mind and keep it independent of its entertainers.

Directly the tutor for the time being, entered at his appointed hour, they rose simultaneously from their work, as if the same spring moved them, hurried towards him with outstretched hands, sat down side by side facing him, and broke into conversation, which if gaspy, and at times inconsequent, from the sudden upheaval of waves of thought in one or other of them, was kept up with gallant relentlessness till the period of detention was at an end.

As soon as the clock announced this event, they broke off suddenly with a click, and the tutor was, so to speak, shot out, and the rent he had made in the lives of his entertainers was patched up as well as might be for that day.

But during the entire first course of those tutors, Mr. and Mrs. Waring felt always as if they were suffering from ragged edges.

As for Gwen and Dacre, their first taste of reclamation from the savage state, was bitter, sudden, and condign. Civilization seems the last thing in the world capable of soothing the savage breast, especially if the savage who owns it is young and in rude health.

Then Mary suffered. It was a hard blow to find her fledglings torn from her in one fell stroke, and only allowed to return at odd moments for repairs to skin and clothes.

Poor Mrs. Fellowes fretted herself into a regular feverish attack.

As for the tutors themselves, the less said of their sufferings the better. Three succumbed to them in four months.

The one that followed, a most excellent person and cut out for a family man, broke off his engagement for fear of consequences, his slight substratum of scientific knowledge having got so much stirred up while at Waring Park, that he grew bewildered.

If such results as he had to deal with, he reflected, were to be seen in the green tree what might not come to pass in the dry? And he was well aware of the cloudy ancestry of his lady-love, and on his own side had not very much to boast of. It was unfortunate. But it certainly did seem sacrilegious impertinence in him to attempt what his betters had so egregiously failed in.