neither knew nor cared what my wayward tenant might be doing; indeed,
so much was my natural force concerned in the heart-affair of the
moment that the other wretch within me lay as it were bound in a
dungeon. He never saw the light. The sun to him was dark and silent
was the moon. There, in fact, he remained for some five or six years,
while sex pricked its way into me intent upon the making of a man. He,
maybe, was to have something to say to that, something to do with
it--but not yet.

So much for calf-love; but now for a more important matter. I left the
Grammar School at S----, at the age when boys usually go to their
Harrow and Winchester, as well equipped, I daresay, as most boys of my
years; for with the rudiments I had been fairly diligent, and with
some of them even had become expert. I was well grounded in Latin and
French grammar, and in English literature was far ahead of boys much
older than myself. Looking back now upon the drilling I had at S----,
I consider it was well done; but I have to set against the benefits I
got from the system the fact that I had much privacy and all the
chance which that gives a boy to educate himself withal. My school
hours limited my intercourse with the school world. Before and after
them I could develop at my own pace and in my own way--and I did. I
believe that when I went to my great school I had the makings of an
interesting lad in me; but I declare upon my conscience that it was
that place only which checked the promise for ten years or more, and
might have withered it altogether.

My father was an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursed
in his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of the
International Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful planting
of foreign stock in England after that, and one of its weedy saplings