tayed on" at the school.

But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and
fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.

Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in
absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness.
The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, it
has abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us still live and
breathe pantry and housekeeper's room, we are quit of the dream of
living by economising parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that park
there were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space
of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there was
mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park of
deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard the
belling of stags, came upon young fawns among the bracken, found bones,
skulls, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that gave
a gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural
splendour. There was a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight under
the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire
in my memory; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty.

And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew read I
never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since gathered, had
a fascination for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew of
intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who built
the house; and thrust away, neglected and despised, in an old room
upstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout
among during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a
shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much
of Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and with most
of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means
of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broad
eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me
mightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Holland
showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable
people attired in pagodas--I say it deliberately, "pagodas." There were
Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since
lost; and many a voya