he comfort I was to them. It was a _fraus pia_, but it
was a most downright _fraus_."

I think I may relate one other curious incident among his public
school experiences: it may seem very incredible, but I have his word
for it that it is true.

"A sixth-form boy took a fancy to me, and let me sit in his room, and
helped me in my work. The night before he left the school I was
sitting there, and just before I went away, being rather overcome
with regretful sentiments, he caught hold of me by the arm and said,
among other things, 'And now that I am going away, and shall probably
never see you again, I don't believe you care one bit.' I don't know
how I came to do it," he said, "because I was never demonstrative;
but I bent down and kissed him on the cheek, and then blushed up to
my ears. He let me go at once; he was very much astonished, and I
think not a little pleased; but it was certainly a curious incident."

During this time his intellectual development was proceeding slowly.
"I went through three phases," he said. "I began by a curious love
for pastoral and descriptive poetry. I read Thomson and Cowper,
similes from 'Paradise Lost,' and other selections of my own; I read
Tennyson, and revelled in the music of the lines and words. I
intended to be a poet.

"Then I became omnivorous, and read everything, whether I understood
it or not, especially biographies. I spent all my spare time in the
school library; one only valuable thing have I derived from that--a
capacity for taking in the sense of a page at a glance, and having a
verbal memory of a skimmed book for an hour or two superior to any
one that I ever met."

Then there came an ebb, and he read nothing, but loafed all day,
and tried to talk. He had a notion he said, that he could argue
Socratically; and he was always trying to introduce metaphors into
his conversation. But his remarks in a much later letter to a friend
on childish reading are so pertinent that I introduce them here.

"Never take a book away from a child unless it is positively vicious;
that they should learn how to read a book and read it quickly is the
great point; that they should get a habit of reading, and feel a void
without it, is what should be cultivated. Never mind if it is trash
now; their tastes will insensibly alter. I like a boy to cram himself
with novels; a day will come when he is sick of them, and rejects
them for the study of facts. What we want to give a child is
'book