at's of any use
to him? You'll think I am talking like an ignorant fool, I dare say, but
hear me out. Between eight and seventeen I went to six different
schools. The country in those days was spotted with them. Some were
called colleges, some academies, one was called an 'Ecole' of something
or other. Each one I went to had a different badge, a different coloured
tassel, a different set of rules and subjects. Barring the last one,
which was down in Essex, near Maldon, they were simply swindles. A mile
from our house was a board-school, but it would not have been keeping up
our position to send me there. I learned to read and write, but, Great
God! curiosity will make a child do that. If he isn't curious to learn
what's the use of him learning? He just forgets it, as I forgot it, as
you did too very likely, forgot it and learned it again when you needed
to. A child ought to be outdoors learning the names of flowers and trees
and birds. I know what I'm talking about, mind! You may fancy that if a
boy is going into the professions as I was to go, as I did go, he ought
to be schooled. Well, when I entered my profession at seventeen, I had
to begin at the bottom for all my schooling. I know as much of
'professions' as most men, and I say of schools, I have no faith in
them. The men who teach them know nothing. They're frauds and they know
it. All that these schools did for me was to teach me the importance of
keeping up a position.

"Twenty per cent! Twenty per cent! The madness of it! The holes and
corners he had rushed into, in his frantic hunt for twenty per cent! A
bank in Australia, a railroad in Ecuador, a sailing ship that never by
any chance sailed into prosperity, a ginger-beer works in Denmark, a
cement works in Spain, a foolish concern which proposed to earn vast
sums by buying moribund bad debts, a drydock in Japan, and a
lunatic-scheme for shoeing horses without nails! This last invention, if
I remember rightly, was to fasten them with steel suspenders and a kind
of cuff-button over the pastern! And we couldn't even leave the infernal
things to die of inanition. Not content with paying no dividend, their
familiar demons used to wake up and demand more capital. Calls! I would
come home from school for my vacation and find my mother nearly crazy
over another call. We were so simple that at first we paid them, and my
father's old 'business friends' (he hadn't any others that I ever heard
of) saw no objection. Hump