heels I fashioned a cart, between the shafts of which I travelled
many leagues into the wilds of Middlesex and Essex. "Leagues" must be
understood in the sense in which Don Quixote would have used the word.
I do not suppose I ever traversed more than eight or ten miles at a
time. But never, while the desire to go out and see is living within
me, shall I forget how, one breathless August day, when the air was
heavy with the aroma of creosoted sleepers, my small brother and I
stared through the gates of a level crossing, and saw Epping Forest in
the blue distance! O phantoms of Cortes, Balboa, and De Soto, wert
thou there? O Sir Francis, hadst thou that thrill when

"_Drake went down to the Horn,
And England was crowned thereby_"?

But I grow magniloquent. My object is attained if I can but show that
when my friend took me under his wing at the Institute long years
agone, when the innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might
have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without incongruity,
drifted away from text-books of mechanics, and sat down with Schiller,
Ducoudray, and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a spirit
there boiled under that demure disguise of retiring scholarship--a
spirit fired with an untamable passion for looking over the
back-garden wall!

Even perambulator wheels give out, however. I forget whether the
wheels of my little cart failed before my mother's patience, or the
reverse. I was growing away from those tiny journeys; my head bulged
with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish acquired during long hours of
unsociable communion with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew
the date of Evil Merodach's accession to the Assyrian throne, but I
did not know who killed Cock Robin. I knew more than Keats about the
discovery of the Pacific, but I did not know Keats. I knew exactly how
pig-iron was smelted, but I did not know the iron which enters into
the soul. I knew how to differentiate between living and non-living
matter, but I did not know that I was alive. Then a new heaven and a
new hell opened before me; I was sent away to school.

Concerning school and, after school, apprenticeship, I shall
not speak. Neither mind nor body can wander far in those humane
penitentiaries called schools. I had fed myself with _History_ since I
had learned, painfully enough, to read, and here at school I found I
knew nothing. What did it matter? The joy of knowing the name of the
wife of Dari