srael.' Here was something he
did know, and it was something not worth knowing. I found that my boys
had been educated on much the same principle. They could do a simple
problem of mathematics after a fashion; that is, they could recite it;
but it had never once been suggested to them as an exercise of reason.
It was the same with history; they could recite dates and facts, but
they had no perception of principles. It may be imagined that I had to
go to school again myself before I could attempt to instruct them. I
had to take down again my long disused Virgil and Cicero, and work
through many a forgotten passage. At first the task was distasteful
enough, but it soon became fascinating. My love of the classics
revived. I began to read Homer and Thucydides, Tacitus and Lucretius,
for my own pleasure. It was delightful to observe what interest my
boys took in Virgil, as soon as they discovered that Virgil was not a
mere task-book, but poetry of the noblest order. By avoiding all idea
of mere unintelligent task-work, I soon got them to take a real
interest in their work, until at last they came to anticipate the hour
of these common studies. I took care also to never make the burden of
study oppressive. Two hours of real study is as much as a young boy
can bear at a time. He should rise from his task, not with an
exhausted, but with a fresh and quickened, mind. On very fine days it
was understood that no books should be opened. Such days were spent in
fishing, in mountain-climbing, or in long cycling excursions, and the
store of health laid up by these days gave new vigour to the mind when
the work of education was resumed.

When the summer came on, life became a daily lyric of delight. By five
in the morning, sometimes by four, we were out fishing. In the narrow
part of the glen there was a place where the rocks met in a wild
miniature gorge, and through them the water poured into a large
circular rock-basin, about forty feet in diameter. This was our
bathing-pool, and the cool shock and thrill of those exquisitely pure
and flowing waters runs along my nerves still as I write. We often
spent more than an hour there in the early morning, swimming from side
to side of our natural bath, diving off a rock which rose almost in the
centre of the pool, passing to and fro under the cascade, or sitting
out in the sun, till sheer hunger drove us home to breakfast. Writers
who boast a sort of finical superiority