rs. Yet my friend was timid also and that restored my confidence in
myself. He would often ask me to buy the sweets or the ginger-beer because
he was afraid sometimes when speaking to a stranger.

I had one reputation that I valued. At first when I went to the
Hammersmith swimming-baths with the other boys, I was afraid to plunge in
until I had gone so far down the ladder that the water came up to my
thighs; but one day when I was alone I fell from the spring-board which
was five or six feet above the water. After that I would dive from a
greater height than the others and I practised swimming under water and
pretending not to be out of breath when I came up. And then if I ran a
race, I took care not to pant or show any sign of strain. And in this I
had an advantage even over the athlete; for though he could run faster and
was harder to tire than anybody else, he grew very pale and I was often
paid compliments. I used to run with my friend when he was training to
keep him in company. He would give me a long start and soon overtake me.

I followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying
papers that would tell me if he had won or lost. I had seen him described
as "the bright particular star of American athletics," and the wonderful
phrase had thrown enchantment over him. Had he been called the particular
bright star, I should have cared nothing for him. I did not understand the
symptom for years after. I was nursing my own dream, my form of the common
school-boy dream, though I was no longer gathering the little pieces of
broken and rotting wood. Often, instead of learning my lesson, I covered
the white squares of the chessboard on my little table with pen and ink
pictures of myself, doing all kinds of courageous things. One day my
father said "there was a man in Nelson's ship at the battle of Trafalgar,
a ship's purser, whose hair turned white; what a sensitive temperament;
that man should have achieved something!" I was vexed and bewildered, and
am still bewildered and still vexed, finding it a poor and crazy thing
that we who have imagined so many noble persons cannot bring our flesh to
heel.

VI

The head-master was a clergyman, a good-humoured, easy-going man, as
temperate, one had no doubt, in his religious life as in all else, and if
he ever lost sleep on our account, it was from a very proper anxiety as to
our gentility. I was in disgrace once because I went to school in some
brilliant