wood for
exploration, brothers and sister were in their element. They would
climb into the highest chestnut trees in the woods, taking up hampers
and hay for the construction of nests, and at that exalted altitude
play all manner of wild and romantic games. And yet they would also
take up books into those cool branches and do lessons! Of Ste at this
period his governess remarks, "It gave him great pleasure to enter a
new rule in arithmetic"--an illuminative sentence, in which one sees
the governess as well as the child.

It was here in Tunbridge Wells that Ste, with little Baden, now
Guardsman and inventor of war-kites, spent laborious days in
constructing a really serviceable dam in the river, digging there a
deep hole in order to make themselves a luxurious bathing-place. From
early infancy they had been taught to do for themselves. Master B.-P.
could dress and undress himself before he was three years old, and at
three he could speak tolerably well in German as well as English. The
children were encouraged to get knowledge as some other children are
encouraged to get bumptiousness; their parents delighted, and showed
the children their delight, whenever a child did something sensible
and clever; there was no unintelligent admiration of precocity.

The boys dug their own gardens, and from five years of age each child
kept a most careful book of his expenditure by double entry. Their
pennies went chiefly in books and presents, and omnibuses for long
excursions out of London. There was no prohibition as to sweets, but
never a penny of these earnest young double-entry bookkeepers found
its way to the tuck-shop. However, a joke among the brothers was the
following constant entry in the book of one of them: "Orange, L0:0:1."
But no chaff was strong enough to correct that healthy appetite, and
"Orange, L0:0:1" went on through the happy years.

At eleven years of age, Ste was packed off to a small private school,
and here he distinguished himself in the same manner, though of course
on a smaller scale, as Mr. Gladstone did at Eton. His moral courage,
coupled with his athletic prowess, made him the darling of the little
school, and the headmaster sorrowfully told his mother when the boy's
two years' schooling were over that he would thankfully keep him there
without fee of any kind, because by force of character the plucky
little fellow had raised the entire moral tone of the school.

And now we come to what I regard as