e some idea what I was
doing and be able to realize that it is the one and only place
where I ought to be at the moment.

But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I want to try
to express a little of what your kindness has meant to me during
the last two years. I look back at myself just before my sixteenth
birthday when I was feeling that I should have to run away to sea
or do something mad in order to escape that solicitor's office, and
I simply gasp! What and where should I be now if it hadn't been for
you? You have always made light of the burden I must have been, and
though I have tried to show you my gratitude I'm afraid it hasn't
been very successful. I'm not being very successful now in putting
it into words. I know my failure to gain a scholarship at Oxford
has been a great disappointment to you, especially after you had
worked so hard yourself to coach me. Please don't be anxious about
my letting my books go to the wall here. I had a talk about this
with Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to do
in the district must only be done when I have a good morning's work
with my books behind me. I quite realize the importance of a
priest's education. One of the assistant priests here, a man called
Snaith, took a good degree at Cambridge both in classics and
theology, so I shall have somebody to keep me on the lines. If I
stay here three years and then have two years at Glastonbury I
don't honestly think that I shall start off much handicapped by
having missed both public school and university. I expect you're
smiling to read after one week of my staying here three years! But
I assure you that the moment I sat down to supper on the evening of
my arrival I felt at home. I think at first they all thought I was
an eager young Ritualist, but when they found that they didn't get
any rises out of ragging me, they shut up.

This house is a most extraordinary place. It is an old
Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has been made
into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty or ever likely
to be empty so far as I can see! I should think it must be rather
like what the guest house of a monastery used to be like in the old
days before the Reformation. The ground floor of the chapel has
been turned into