Distinguish himself he did. Cranleigh had nourished him but now offered him, at age twelve, nothing more. His parents, who had the highest aspirations for their prodigiously intelligent son, kept tabs on scholarships for which he might be eligible. Around this time, about the scarcest and most coveted scholarship of all was to Winchester, one of England’s most hallowed public schools and a traditional proving ground for the mathematically gifted. Its scholarship exam was among the toughest of its kind; one year in the 1860s, 137 boys competed for seven scholarships. To prepare for it, you
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