n board the tug which served us as a tender.
Presently I saw him lean over the rail and wave his hand. When he saw
that I noticed him he called out in French once more, with angry,
scornful reproach,--

"If you were not there, how, _how_ can you speak it?"

A GRADUATE BEYOND SEAS

The travel-micrococcus infected me early. Before I can remember I
travelled in England, and, when my memory begins, a stay of two years in
any town made me weary. My brothers and sisters and I would then inquire
what time the authorities meant to send my father elsewhere, and we were
accustomed to denounce any delay on the part of a certain Government
department in giving us "the route." Such a youth was gipsying, and if
any original fever of the blood led to wandering, such a training
heightened the tendency. To this day even, after painful and laborious
travel, Fate cannot persuade me that my stakes should not be pulled up
at intervals. I understand "trek fever," which, after all, is only
Eldorado hunting. With the settler unsatisfied a belief in immortality
takes its place.

In the ferment of youth and childhood, which now threatens to quiet
down, my feet stayed in many English towns and villages, from
Barnstaple to Carlisle, from Bedford to Manchester, and I hated them all
with fervour, only mitigating my wrath by great reading. I could only
read at eight years of age, but from that time until eleven I read a
mingled and most preposterous mass of literature and illiterature. It
was a substitute for travel, and, in my case, not a substitute only, but
a provoker. Reading is mostly dram-drinking, mostly drugging; it throws
a veil over realities. With the child I knew best it urged him on and
infected me with world-hunger and roused activities. To be sure the
Elder Brethren, who are youth's first gaolers, nearly made me believe,
by dint of repetition (they, themselves, probably believing it by now),
that books and knowledge, which are acquired for, with, by and through
examinations, were, of themselves, noble and admirable, and that an
adequate acquaintance with them (provided such acquaintance could be
proved adequate to Her Majesty's Commissioners of the Civil Service)
would inevitably make a man of me. For the opinion is rooted deep in
many minds that to surrender one's wings, to clip one's claws, to put a
cork in one's raptorial beak, and masquerade in a commercial barnyard,
is to be a very fine fowl indeed.

Some spirit of r