A further sheaf of such notices reached him every morning for about two months; but as none of them offered him more than a hundred-and-twenty pounds a year, and most of them a good deal less, Arthur Robinson, who was a sensible young man, resisted the temptation, overpowering to most of us, of seizing the very first opportunity of earning a salary, however small, simply because he had never earned anything before, and allowed the notices to accumulate upon one end of his mantelpiece.
Finally he had recourse to his old College tutor, who advised him of a vacancy at Eaglescliffe, a great public school in the west of England, and by a timely private note to the Headmaster secured his appointment.
Next morning Arthur Robinson received from the directorate of the scholastic agency--the existence of which he had almost forgotten--a rapturous letter of congratulation, reminding him that the Agency had sent him notice of the vacancy upon a specified date, and delicately intimating that their commission of five per cent. upon the first year's salary was payable on appointment. Arthur, who had long since given up the task of breasting the Agency's morning tide of desirable vacancies, mournfully investigated the heap upon the mantelpiece, and found that the facts were as stated. There lay the notice, sandwiched between a document relating to the advantages to be derived from joining the staff of a private school in North Wales, where material prosperity was guaranteed by a salary of eighty pounds per annum, and social success by the prospect of meat-tea with the Principal and his family; and another, in which a clergyman (retired) required a thoughtful and energetic assistant (one hundred pounds a year, non-resident) to aid him in the management of a small but select seminary for backward and epileptic boys.
Arthur laid the matter before his tutor, who informed him that he must pay up, and be a little less casual in his habits in future. He therefore wrote a reluctant cheque for ten pounds, and having thus painfully imbibed the first lesson that a schoolmaster must learn--namely, the importance of attending to details--departed to take up his appointment at Eaglescliffe.
He arrived the day before term began, to find that lodgings had been apportioned to him at a house in the village, half a mile from the School. His first evening was spent in making the place habitable. That is to say, he removed a number of portraits of his landlady's relatives from the walls and mantelpiece, and stored them, together with a collection of Early Victorian heirlooms--wool-mats and prism-laden glass vases--in a cupboard under the window-seat. In their place he set up fresh gods; innumerable signed photographs of young men, some in frames, some in rows along convenient ledges, others bunched together in a sort of wire entanglement much in vogue among the undergraduates of that time. Some of these photographs were mounted upon light-blue mounts, and these were placed in the most conspicuous position. Upon the walls he hung a collection of framed groups of more young men, with bare knees and severe expressions, in some of which Arthur Robinson himself figured.