n his tirade which principally affected me was
this. He said, 'You will soon be leaving us, and going up to
lodgings in London, and if your landlady should come into your
room, and find such a book lying about, she would immediately set
you down as a profligate.' I did not understand this at all, and
it seems to me now that the fact that I had so very simply and
childishly volunteered to read the verses to my stepmother should
have proved to my Father that I connected it with no ideas of an
immoral nature.

I was greatly wounded and offended, but my indignation was
smothered up in the alarm and excitement which followed the news
that I was to go up to live in lodgings, and, as it was evident,
alone, in London. Of this no hint or whisper had previously
reached me. On reflection, I can but admit that my Father, who
was little accustomed to seventeenth-century literature, must
have come across some startling exposures in Ben Jonson, and
probably never reached 'Hero and Leander' at all. The artistic
effect of such poetry on an innocently pagan mind did not come
within the circle of his experience. He judged the outspoken
Elizabethan poets, no doubt, very much in the spirit of the
problematical landlady.

Of the world outside, of the dim wild whirlpool of London, I was
much afraid, but I was now ready to be willing to leave the
narrow Devonshire circle, to see the last of the red mud, of the
dreary village street, of the plethoric elders, to hear the last
of the drawling voices of the 'Saints'. Yet I had a great
difficulty in persuading myself that I could ever be happy away
from home, and again I compared my lot with that of one of the
speckled soldier-crabs that roamed about in my Father's aquarium,
dragging after them great whorl-shells. They, if by chance they
were turned out of their whelk-habitations, trailed about a pale
soft body in search of another house, visibly broken-hearted and
the victims of every ignominious accident.

My spirits were divided pathetically between the wish to stay on,
a guarded child, and to proceed into the world, a budding man,
and, in my utter ignorance, I sought in vain to conjure up what
my immediate future would be. My Father threw no light upon the
subject, for he had not formed any definite idea of what I could
possibly do to earn an honest living. As a matter of fact I was
to stay another year at school and home.

This last year of my boyish life passed rapidly and pleasantly.