Susan immensely. The advertisements of the summer terms for Cough
Linctus were removed; the bottles of coloured water--red, green, and
yellow--restored to their places; the horse announcing veterinary
medicine, which my uncle, sizzling all the while, had coloured in
careful portraiture of a Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turned
myself even more resolutely than before to Latin (until the passing
of my preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then to
mathematics and science.

There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar School. I
took a little "elementary" prize in that in my first year and a medal
in my third; and in Chemistry and Human Physiology and Sound, Light
and Heat, I did well. There was also a lighter, more discursive
subject called Physiography, in which one ranged among the sciences
and encountered Geology as a process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry
House, and Astronomy as a record of celestial movements of the most
austere and invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written,
condensed little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, but
still I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt of
the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone as
a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was no
argon, no radium, no phagocytes--at least to my knowledge, and aluminium
was a dear, infrequent metal. The fastest ships in the world went then
at nineteen knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thought
it possible that men might fly.

Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had of
Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its pleasant
tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh houses--at least not
actually in the town, though about the station there had been some