re growing with unwholesome activity, while others were
stunted, or had never stirred at all. I was like a plant on which
a pot has been placed, with the effect that the centre is crushed
and arrested, while shoots are straggling up to the light on all
sides. My Father himself was aware of this, and in a spasmodic
way he wished to regulate my thoughts. But all he did was to try
to straighten the shoots, without removing the pot which kept
them resolutely down.

It was my stepmother who decided that I was now old enough to go
to boarding-school, and my Father, having discovered that an
elderly couple of Plymouth Brethren kept an 'academy for young
gentlemen' in a neighbouring seaport town,--in the prospectus of
which the knowledge and love of the Lord were mentioned as
occupying the attention of the head--master and his assistants
far more closely than any mere considerations of worldly
tuition,--was persuaded to entrust me to its care. He stipulated,
however, that I should always come home from Saturday night to
Monday morning, not, as he said, that I might receive any carnal
indulgence, but that there might be no cessation of my communion
as a believer with the Saints in our village on Sundays. To this
school, therefore, I presently departed, gawky and homesick, and
the rift between my soul and that of my Father widened a little
more.

CHAPTER XII

LITTLE boys from quiet, pious households, commonly found, in
those days, a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience
when they arrived at Boarding-school. But the fact that I still
slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I
fancy, from many surprises. There was a crisis, but it was broad
and slow for me. On the other hand, for my Father I am inclined
to think that it was definite and sharp. Permission for me to
desert the parental hearth, even for five days in certain weeks,
was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme,
so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must in its primitive
bigness be now dropped.

The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of
capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be
exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my
life, 'to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised
service of the Lord'. That had been the aspiration of my Mother,
and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my Father,
like a dream of the Promised Land. In their ecstas