lboys of a similar age, with a view to comparing
the sum of their knowledge with my own in those Putney days. And,
curious though it seems, it does certainly appear to me that the
comparison was never to the advantage of the modern boy; though I am
assured he must enjoy the benefits of some kind of thought-out
educational system. I certainly did not. These things partake of the
nature of mysteries.

I suppose the successive servant maids who chiefly controlled my early
childhood must have been more ignorant than any member of their class
in post-Board School days. Yet it seems beyond question clear to me
that such beginnings of a mind as I possessed at the age of ten, such
mental tendencies as I was beginning to show, were at all events more
hopeful, more rational, better worth having, than those I have been
able to discern in the twentieth-century London office boy, fresh from
his palatial County Council School. I may be quite wrong, of course,
but that is how it appears to me--despite all the uplifting influences
of halfpenny newspapers, and picture theatres, and the forward march
of democracy.

Then there is that notable point, the question of speech; the vehicle
of mental expression and thought transference. Between the ages of one
year and nine years, society for me was confined almost exclusively to
servant girls. From their lips it was that I acquired the faculty of
speech. Yet I am certain that the boy who walked in Richmond Park with
my father in the 'sixties spoke in his dialect, and not in that of
Cockney nursemaids. Why was that? If my father ever corrected my
speech it was upon very rare occasions. I remember them perfectly.
They were not such corrections as would very materially affect a lad's
accent or choice of words.

Having read a good deal more than I had conversed, I was mentally
familiar with certain words which I never had happened to have heard
pronounced. One instance I recall. (It was toward the end of my
Academy period.) I had occasion to read aloud some passage to my
father, and it included the word 'inevitable,' which in my innocence I
pronounced with the accent on the third syllable. Up went my father's
eyebrows. 'Inev_it_able,' he mimicked, with playful scorn. And that
was all. He offered no correction. I recall that I was covered in rosy
confusion, and, guessing rightly, by some happy chance (or unconscious
recollection) hit upon the conventional pronunciation, never to forget
it. But,