ted me wrong. They never started me at all. I only began to
find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if
I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest....

"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a
cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU be
warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to
show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get
education, get a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's your
only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and property
minding. There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you
at suchlike games. You and I are the brainy unstable kind, topside or
nothing. And if ever those blithering houses come to you--don't have
'em. Give them away! Dynamite 'em--and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of
them for you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say."...

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet
exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, with
resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out
clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed
along them. That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring
pebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have
the clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with a
deer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimes
between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became
diverted by his talk from his original exasperation....

This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the
time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become
the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't understand
the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad
ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them
to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a
sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the
human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of
order and economy which he called variously Science and C