CHAPTER IV



THE passage from the romantic to the realistic, from the
chimerical to the actual, from the child's poetic
interpretation of life to life's practical version of itself,
is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on.
It is only in the retrospect we see the change. There is
still, for yet another stage, the same and even greater
receptivity, - delight in new experiences, in gratified
curiosity, in sensuous enjoyment, in the exercise of growing
faculties. But the belief in the impossible and the bliss of
ignorance are seen, when looking back, to have assumed almost
abruptly a cruder state of maturer dulness. Between the
public schoolboy and the child there is an essential
difference; and this in a boy's case is largely due, I fancy,
to the diminished influence of woman, and the increased
influence of men.

With me, certainly, the rough usage I was ere long to undergo
materially modified my view of things in general. In 1838,
when I was eleven years old, my uncle, Henry Keppel, the
future Admiral of the Fleet, but then a dashing young
commander, took me (as he mentions in his Autobiography) to
the Naval Academy at Gosport. The very afternoon of my
admittance - as an illustration of the above remarks - I had
three fights with three different boys. After that the 'new
boy' was left to his own devices, - QUA 'new boy,' that is;