were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep.

"He sat at the back of the room," says Mr. Fordham, "and never
distinguished himself. We thought him the most curious thing that
ever was." His schoolfellows noted how he would stride along,
"apparently muttering poetry, breaking into inane laughter." The kind
of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the
_Autobiography:_ "I was one day wandering about the streets in that
part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies
and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to
apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me."

"I can see him now," wrote Mr. Fordham, "very tall and lanky,
striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes
scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything
he passed; but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one
who not only observed but remembered what he had seen." It was only
of himself that he was really oblivious.

Mr. Oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they
filled his pockets with snow in the playground. When class
reassembled, the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor.
A small boy raised his hand: "Please Sir, I think the laboratory sink
must be leaking again. The water is coming through and falling all
over Chesterton."

The laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been
short-sighted. "Chesterton," he said, "go up to Mr. ---- and ask him
with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put
right immediately." Gilbert, with water still streaming from both