such an intricacy as never Greek
nor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went
lumbering past, bearing countless people we knew not whence, we knew
not whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers jostled one, a thousand
appeals of shop and boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights
of window and street mingled with the warm glow of the declining day
under the softly flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards,
the shouting news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the
globe. One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice
of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
gesticulations....

That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to living
interests where it might have done so. We were left absolutely to the
hints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoons
of the comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet for
any general ideas whatever about the huge swirling world process
in which we found ourselves. I always look back with particular
exasperation to the cessation of our modern history at the year 1815.
There it pulled up abruptly, as though it had come upon something
indelicate....

But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief cricketer on
the staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the place
of this or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matter
of supreme importance to boys. He obliged us to affect a passionate
interest in the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural
enthusiasms. What a fuss there would be when some well-trained boy,
panting as if from Marathon, appeared with an evening paper! "I say, you
chaps, Middlesex all out for a hundred and five!"

Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the
first class. I applied myself industriously year by year to mastering
scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the places
nearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through a slight
mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey for my loyalty,
though as a matter of fact we were by some five hundred yards or so in
Kent. It did quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight and
fast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to bowl Flack out. He
was a bat in the Corinthian style, rich and voluminous,