The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system
permitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in the brief
glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by the ruling class;
the lower classes were not supposed to stand in need of schools, and our
middle stratum got the schools it deserved, private schools, schools any
unqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man who
had had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and
considering how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the place
might have been worse. The building was a dingy yellow-brick residence
outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath and
plaster.

I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy--indeed I recall a
good lot of fine mixed fun in them--but I cannot without grave risk
of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. We
fought much, not sound formal fighting, but "scrapping" of a sincere and
murderous kind, into which one might bring one's boots--it made us tough
at any rate--and several of us were the sons of London publicans, who
distinguished "scraps" where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism,
practising both arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts.
Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without
style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly in
the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes and
taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us arithmetic,
algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even trigonometry, himself;
he had a strong mathematical bias, and I think now that by the standard
of a British public school he did rather well by us.

We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual
neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity of