an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursed
in his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of the
International Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful planting
of foreign stock in England after that, and one of its weedy saplings
was an International Education Company, which out of a magniloquent
prospectus and some too-confident shareholders bore one fruit, the
London International College at Spring Grove. It never came to
maturity, and is now dropped and returned to the ground of all such
schemes. I suppose it had been on the stalk some fifteen years when I
went to feed of it.

The scheme, in fact, sprang out of enthusiasm and had no bottom in
experience. It may be true that all men are brothers, but it is not
logical to infer from that that all brothers are the better for each
other's society. The raw Brazilians, Chilians, Nicaraguans and what
not who were drawn from their native forests and plunged into the
company of blockish Yorkshire lads, or sharp-faced London boys, were
only scared into rebellion and to demonstration after their manner.
They used the knife sometimes; they hardly ever assimilated; and they
taught us nothing that we were the better of knowing. Quite the
contrary. We taught them football, I think, and I remember a negro
from Bermuda, a giant of a fellow who raged over the ground like a
goaded bull when that game was being played, to the consternation of
his opponents. He had a younger brother with inordinately long arms,
like a great lax ape, a cheerful, grinning, harmless creature as I
remember him. He was a football player too; his hug was that of an
octopus which swallowed you all. As for the English, in return for
their football lore they received the gift of tobacco. I learned to
smoke at fifteen from a Chilian called Perez, a wizened,
preternaturally wise, old youth. Nobody in the world could have been
wise as he looked, and nobody else in the school as dull as he really
was. Over this motley assembly was set as house-master a ferocious
Scotchman of great parts, but no discretion; and there were
assistants, too, of scholarship and refinement, who, if they had had
the genius for education, without which these things are nothing,
might have put humanity into some of us. When it was past the time I
discovered this, and one of them became my friend and helper. I then
discovered the tragedy of our system from the other side. For the
pain is a two-edged sword, and imbru