Nevertheless, he was far from happy. Dr. Skinner was much too like
his father. True, Ernest was not thrown in with him much yet, but he
was always there; there was no knowing at what moment he might not put
in an appearance, and whenever he did show, it was to storm about
something. He was like the lion in the Bishop of Oxford's Sunday
story- always liable to rush out from behind some bush and devour
someone when he was least expected. He called Ernest "an audacious
reptile" and said he wondered the earth did not open and swallow him
up because he pronounced Thalia with a short i. "And this to me," he
thundered, "who never made a false quantity in my life." Surely he
would have been a much nicer person if he had made false quantities in
his youth like other people. Ernest could not imagine how the boys
in Dr. Skinner's form continued to live; but yet they did, and even
throve, and, strange as it may seem, idolised him, or professed to
do so, in after life. To Ernest it seemed like living on the crater of
Vesuvius.
He was himself, as has been said, in Mr. Templer's form, who was
snappish, but not downright wicked, and was very easy to crib under.
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