l reproduction--and yet he had listened sleepily. Of
course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this
display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner
voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to
repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will
come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show
how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual,
in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded
schools.

I had been one who thought my own work most important--to the exclusion
even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is
affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be
disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on
without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old
Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and
the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At
meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and
things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere--tension
wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had
he only known it.

The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so
well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined
him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the
time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was
accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands,
regard the bow of shore-line from the East window--the Other Shore--for
a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the
continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of
production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard
lessons resulting from breaking the point of the day's work before
sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much
breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.

However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who
wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what
ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The
answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the
front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this