f
dangling glass lustres, and over the interminable carpet--it impressed
me as about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas--were islands and
archipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables, great Sevres
vases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse. Somewhere in this wilderness
one came, I remember, upon--a big harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand,
and a grand piano....

The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger.

One came down the main service stairs--that was legal, and illegality
began in a little landing when, very cautiously, one went through a red
baize door. A little passage led to the hall, and here one reconnoitered
for Ann, the old head-housemaid--the younger housemaids were friendly
and did not count. Ann located, came a dash across the open space at
the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended
since powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast
of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and
quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous place; it
was double with the thickness of the wall between, so that one could not
listen beforehand for the whisk of the feather-brush on the other side.
Oddly rat-like, is it not, this darting into enormous places in pursuit
of the abandoned crumbs of thought?

And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those shelves. It
seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect,
the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive
fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these
eighteen hundred years to teach that.

VI

The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system
permitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in the brief
glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by the ruling class;
the lower classes were not supposed to stand in need of schools, and our
middle stratum got the schools it deserved, private schools, schools any
unqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man who
had had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and
considering how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the place
might have been worse. The building was a dingy yellow-brick residence
outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath and
plaster.

I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy--indeed I r