times an old tenant
had under his roof my father's shooting-dog and gave it better care than
the annual payment earned. He had set apart for its comfort the best place
at the fire; and if some man were in the place when the dog walked into
the house, the man must needs make room for the dog. And a good while
after the sale, I can remember my father being called upon to settle some
dispute between this old man and his sons.

I was now fifteen; and as he did not want to leave his painting my father
told me to go to Harcourt Street and put myself to school. I found a bleak
18th century house and a small playing-field full of mud and pebbles,
fenced by an iron railing from a wide 18th century street, but opposite a
long hoarding and a squalid, ornamental railway station. Here, as I soon
found, nobody gave a thought to decorum. We worked in a din of voices. We
began the morning with prayers, but when class began the head-master, if
he was in the humour, would laugh at Church and Clergy. "Let them say what
they like," he would say, "but the earth does go round the sun." On the
other hand there was no bullying and I had not thought it possible that
boys could work so hard. Cricket and football, the collection of moths and
butterflies, though not forbidden, were discouraged. They were for idle
boys. I did not know, as I used to, the mass of my school-fellows; for we
had little life in common outside the class-rooms. I had begun to think of
my school-work as an interruption of my natural history studies, but even
had I never opened a book not in the school course, I could not have
learned a quarter of my night's work. I had always done Euclid easily,
making the problems out while the other boys were blundering at the
blackboard, and it had often carried me from the bottom to the top of my
class; but these boys had the same natural gift and instead of being in
the fourth or fifth book were in the modern books at the end of the
primer; and in place of a dozen lines of Virgil with a dictionary, I was
expected to learn with the help of a crib a hundred and fifty lines. The
other boys were able to learn the translation off, and to remember what
words of Latin and English corresponded with one another, but I, who it
may be had tried to find out what happened in the parts we had not read,
made ridiculous mistakes; and what could I, who never worked when I was
not interested, do with a history lesson that was but a column of seventy
dat