the book, yet they never found it.

Robert now being eighteen, a man grown--not large, but very strong and
wiry--his father made arrangements for him to take a minor clerkship in
the Bank. But the boy rebelled--he was going to be an artist, or a poet,
or something like that.

The father argued that a man could be a poet and still work in a bank--the
salary was handy; and there was no money in poetry. In fact, he himself
was a poet, as his father had been before him. To be a bank-clerk and at
the same time a poet--what nobler ambition!

The young man was still stubborn. He was feeling discontented with his
environment: he was cramped, cabined, cribbed, confined. He wanted to get
out of the world of petty plodding and away from the silly round of
conventions, out into the world of art--or else of barbarism--he didn't
care which.

The latter way opened first, and a bit of wordy warfare with his father on
the subject of idleness sent him off to a gipsy camp at Epsom Downs. How
long he lived with the vagabonds we do not know, but his swarthy skin, and
his skill as a boxer and wrestler, recommended him to the ragged gentry,
and they received him as a brother.

It is probable that a week of pure vagabondia cured him of the idea that
civilization is a disease, for he came back home, made a bonfire of his
attire, and after a vigorous tubbing, was clothed in his right mind.

Groggy studies in French under a private tutor followed, and then came a
term as special student in Greek at London University.