in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm of Gilead and manna in
the desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land; I
recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk
remained pious in form but became medical in substance, and how the
women got together for obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did not
matter, and might overhear.

If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think my
invincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered by the
circle of Uncle Frapp.

I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frapp
fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the laborious disorder
of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental deliveries of bread and so
forth, and in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relations
with the Blood, and his confidential explanations that ten shillings
a week--which was what my mother paid him--was not enough to cover my
accommodation. He was very anxious to keep that, but also he wanted
more. There were neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house
where reading was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of
worldly things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in
me daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and tramped
about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me particularly. One saw
there smudgy illustrated sheets, the Police News in particular, in
which vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence an
interminable succession of squalid crimes, women murdered and put into
boxes, buried under floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers,
people thrust suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and
so forth by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that. Interspersed
with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the urban John Bull, had
his fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella, or the kindly empty faces
of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared, visiting this, opening
that, getting married, getting offspring, lying in state, doing
everything but anything, a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race
apart.

I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my mind is
one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a maturer charity.
All its effects arranged themselves as antithetical to the Bladesover
effects. They confirmed and intensified a