ecall a
good lot of fine mixed fun in them--but I cannot without grave risk
of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. We
fought much, not sound formal fighting, but "scrapping" of a sincere and
murderous kind, into which one might bring one's boots--it made us tough
at any rate--and several of us were the sons of London publicans, who
distinguished "scraps" where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism,
practising both arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts.
Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without
style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly in
the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes and
taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us arithmetic,
algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even trigonometry, himself;
he had a strong mathematical bias, and I think now that by the standard
of a British public school he did rather well by us.

We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual
neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity of
natural boys, we "cheeked," and "punched" and "clouted"; we thought
ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and such-like honourable things,
and not young English gentlemen; we never felt the strain of "Onward
Christian soldiers," nor were swayed by any premature piety in the cold
oak pew of our Sunday devotions. All that was good. We spent our rare
pennies in the uncensored reading matter of the village dame's shop, on
the Boys of England, and honest penny dreadfuls--ripping stuff, stuff
that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly
illustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we were
allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes wide and far
about the land, talking experimentally, dreaming wildly. There was much
in those walks! To this day the landscape of the Kentish world, with its
low broad distances, its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its
oasts and square church towers, its background of downland and hangers,
has for me a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of its
beauty. We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper
"boyish" things to do; we never "robbed an orchard" for example, though
there were orchards all about us, we thought stealing was sinful, we
stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries from the fields
indeed, but in a crimi