and below and before me. They had an air of being no more than
incidents, interruptions.

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City
Merchants School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the
mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which
occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere
interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant
spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career. School
life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was
joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went
together. Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our
morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of
rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have
passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them
again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main
gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-
proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are
imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the
old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams
that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western
boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not
been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went
up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a
mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's
estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our
national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck