y formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead.
I went there as a day boy. The charge for my instruction was mainly set
off by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered
fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate
youngsters who take readily to school work, I had a good memory,
versatile interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, and
when I was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City Merchants
School and was entrusted with a scholar's railway season ticket to
Victoria. After my father's death a large and very animated and solidly
built uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's
sister's husband, with a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds,
who had plunged into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but
who was otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the
three gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my
father's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge
within sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal
Palace. Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge of
Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and
outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and
trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's notice-board,
the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut off
a large part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences
and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinary
spectacle of meteorology a great variety of gratuitous fireworks which
banged and flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see
them better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham
and Greenwich, impressed upon me the interminable extent of London's
residential suburbs; mile after mile one went, between houses, villas,
rows of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over railway
bridges. I have forgotten the detailed local characteristics--if there
were