lities, and tended rather to live
an inner life in the region of friendship and the artistic emotions. If
I had been possessed of private means, I should, no doubt, have become
a full-fledged dilettante. But that doubtful privilege was denied me,
and for a good many years I lived a busy and fairly successful life as
a master at a big public school. I will not dwell upon this, but I will
say that I gained a great interest in the science of education, and
acquired profound misgivings as to the nature of the intellectual
process known by the name of secondary education. More and more I began
to perceive that it is conducted on diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like
lines. I tried my best, as far as it was consistent with loyalty to an
established system, to correct the faulty bias. But it was with a
profound relief that I found myself suddenly provided with a literary
task of deep interest, and enabled to quit my scholastic labours. At
the same time, I am deeply grateful for the practical experience I was
enabled to gain, and even more for the many true and pleasant
friendships with colleagues, parents, and boys that I was allowed to
form.

What a waste of mental energy it is to be careful and troubled about
one's path in life! Quite unexpectedly, at this juncture, came my
election to a college Fellowship, giving me the one life that I had
always eagerly desired, and the possibility of which had always seemed
closed to me.

I became then a member of a small and definite society, with a few
prescribed duties, just enough, so to speak, to form a hem to my life
of comparative leisure. I had acquired and kept, all through my life as
a schoolmaster, the habit of continuous literary work; not from a sense
of duty, but simply from instinctive pleasure. I found myself at once
at home in my small and beautiful college, rich with all kinds of
ancient and venerable traditions, in buildings of humble and subtle
grace. The little dark-roofed chapel, where I have a stall of my own;
the galleried hall, with its armorial glass; the low, book-lined
library; the panelled combination-room, with its dim portraits of old
worthies: how sweet a setting for a quiet life! Then, too, I have my
own spacious rooms, with a peaceful outlook into a big close, half
orchard, half garden, with bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees,
bounded by a slow river.

And then, to teach me how "to borrow life and not grow old," the happy
tide of fresh and vigoro