My uncle met us and got in, and away the chaise rattled, bearing me
towards an utterly new experience; for hardly could the strangest
region in foreign lands be more unknown to the wandering mariner than
the faces and ways of even my own kind were to me. I had never played
for one half-hour with boy or girl. I knew nothing of their play-things
or their games. I hardly knew what boys were like, except, outwardly,
from the dim reflex of myself in the broken mirror in my bed-room,
whose lustre was more of the ice than the pool, and, inwardly, from the
partly exceptional experiences of my own nature, with which even I was
poorly enough acquainted.




CHAPTER VIII.


I GO TO SCHOOL, AND GRANNIE LEAVES IT.

It is an evil thing to break up a family before the natural period of
its dissolution. In the course of things, marriage, the necessities of
maintenance, or the energies of labour guiding 'to fresh woods and
pastures new,' are the ordered causes of separation.

Where the home is happy, much injury is done the children in sending
them to school, except it be a day-school, whither they go in the
morning as to the labours of the world, but whence they return at night
as to the heaven of repose. Conflict through the day, rest at night, is
the ideal. A day-school will suffice for the cultivation of the
necessary public or national spirit, without which the love of the