eemed to pile
up his despair.

One of the last to whom he held, in silence, the trembling slate
was the perpetrator. As I saw the moment approach, an unspeakable
timidity swept over me. I reflected that no one had seen me, that
no one could accuse me. Nothing could be easier or safer than to
deny, nothing more perplexing to the enemy, nothing less perilous
for the culprit. A flood of plausible reasons invaded my brain; I
seemed to see this to be a case in which to tell the truth would
be not merely foolish, it would be wrong. Yet when the usher
stood before me, holding the slate out in his white and shaking
hand, I seized the pencil, and, ignoring the first question, I
wrote 'Yes' firmly against the second. I suppose that the
ambiguity of this action puzzled Mr. B. He pressed me to answer:
'Did you do it?' but to that I was obstinately dumb; and away I
was hurried to an empty bed-room, where for the whole of that
night and the next day I was held a prisoner, visited at
intervals by the headmaster and other inquisitorial persons,
until I was gradually persuaded to make a full confession and
apology.

This absurd little incident had one effect, it revealed me to my
schoolfellows as an existence. From that time forth I lay no
longer under the stigma of invisibility; I had produced my
material shape and had thrown my shadow for a moment into a
legend. But, in other respects, things went on much as before.

Curiously uninfluenced by my surroundings, I in my turn failed to
exercise influence, and my practical isolation was no less than
it had been before. It was thus that it came about that my social
memories of my boarding-school life are monotonous and vague. It
was a period during which, as it appears to me now on looking
back, the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow
pool which was almost stagnant. I was labouring to gain those
elements of conventional knowledge, which had, in many cases, up
to that time been singularly lacking. But my brain was starved,
and my intellectual perceptions were veiled. Elder persons who in
later years would speak to me frankly of my school-days assured
me that, while I had often struck them as a smart and quaint and
even interesting child, all promise seemed to fade out of me as a
schoolboy, and that those who were most inclined to be indulgent
gave up the hope that I should prove a man in a way remarkable.
This was particularly the case with the most indulgent of my