n he would jerk back suddenly into
staring wakefulness as though he were fishing--with himself as bait--for
schoolboy crimes in the waters of oblivion--and fancied a nibble. That
was a dangerous time, full of anxiety. At last he went right under and
slept, and the reading grew cheerful, full of quaint glosses and
unexpected gaps, leaping playfully from boy to boy, instead of
travelling round with a proper decorum. But it never ceased, and little
Hurkley's silly little squeak of a voice never broke in upon its mellow
flow. (It took a year for Hurkley's voice to break.) Any such
interruption and Mr. Sandsome woke up and into his next phase
forthwith--a disagreeable phase always, and one we made it our business
to postpone as long as possible.

During that final period, the last quarter, Mr. Sandsome was distinctly
malignant. It was hard to do right; harder still to do wrong. A feverish
energy usually inspired our government. "Let us try to get some work
done," Mr. Sandsome would say--and I have even known him teach things
then. More frequently, with a needless bitterness, he set us upon
impossible tasks, demanding a colossal tale of sums perhaps, scattering
pens and paper and sowing the horrors of bookkeeping, or chastising us
with the scorpions of parsing and translation. And even in wintry
weather the little room grew hot and stuffy, and we terminated our
schoolday, much exhausted, with minds lax, lounging attitudes, and red
ears. What became of Mr. Sandsome after the giving-out of home-work, the
concluding prayer, and the aftermath of impositions, I do not know. I
stuffed my books, such as came to hand--very dirty they were inside, and
very neat out with my Aunt Charlotte's chintz covers--into my green
baize bag, and went forth from the mysteries of schooling into the great
world, up the broad white road that went slanting over the Down.

I say "the mysteries of schooling" deliberately. I wondered then, I
wonder still, what it was all for. Reading, almost my only art, I learnt
from Aunt Charlotte; a certain facility in drawing I acquired at home
and took to school, to my own undoing. "Undoing," again, is
deliberate--it was no mere swish on the hand, gentle reader. But the
things I learnt, more or less partially, at school, lie in my mind, like
the "Sarsen" stones of Wiltshire--great, disconnected, time-worn chunks
amidst the natural herbage of it. "The Rivers of the East Coast; the
Tweed, the Tyne, the Wear, the Tees,