that I should find school better than home. Before the first day was
over, the sorrows of the lost watch and sword had vanished utterly. For
what was possession to being possessed? What was a watch, even had it
been going, to the movements of life? To peep from the wicket in the
great gate out upon the village street, with the well in the middle of
it, and a girl in the sunshine winding up the green dripping bucket
from the unknown depths of coolness, was more than a thousand watches.
But this was by no means the extent of my new survey of things. One of
the causes of Mr Elder's keeping no boy who required chastisement was
his own love of freedom, and his consequent desire to give the boys as
much liberty out of school hours as possible. He believed in freedom.
'The great end of training,' he said to me many years after, when he
was quite an old man, 'is liberty; and the sooner you can get a boy to
be a law to himself, the sooner you make a man of him. This end is
impossible without freedom. Let those who have no choice, or who have
not the same end in view, do the best they can with such boys as they
find: I chose only such as could bear liberty. I never set up as a
reformer--only as an educator. For that kind of work others were more
fit than I. It was not my calling.' Hence Mr Elder no more allowed
labour to intrude upon play, than play to intrude upon labour. As soon
as lessons were over, we were free to go where we would and do what we
would, under certain general restrictions, which had more to do with
social proprieties than with school regulations. We roamed the country
from tea-time till sun-down; sometimes in the Summer long after that.
Sometimes also on moonlit nights in Winter, occasionally even when the
stars and the snow gave the only light, we were allowed the same
liberty until nearly bedtime. Before Christmas came, variety, exercise,
and social blessedness had wrought upon me so that when I returned
home, my uncle and aunt were astonished at the change in me. I had
grown half a head, and the paleness, which they had considered a