agments of which would sometimes
fall unexpectedly, and the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern
and much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.

As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at a
time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable tenants,
he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote the
rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessant
necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairing
himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother would
not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy,
unpunctual and not always successful manner in the unoccupied gardens.
The three houses faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was
covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes
for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable
autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an important
part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he was pruning it,
when I was thirteen.

My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always
good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one of
the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted
him in his school until increasing competition and diminishing
attendance had made it evident that the days of small private schools
kept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon my father had
roused himself and had qualified as a science teacher under the Science
and Art Department, which in these days had charge of the scientific and
artistic education of the mass of the English population, and had thrown
himself into science teaching and the earning of government grants
therefor with great if transitory zeal and success.

I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married when my
father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw only the last
decadent phase of his educational career.

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness and
generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or
less completely digested into the Board of Education.

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how many
of the clumsy and lim