s he was saying. And sometimes he was
manifestly talking to himself and airing his outlook. He carried a
walking-stick, a manly, homely, knobby, donnish walking-stick.

He forced the pace a little, for his legs were long and he had acquired
the habit of strenuous pedestrianism at Oxford with all the other
things; he obliged me to go at a kind of skipping trot, and he preferred
the high roads towards Wickenham for our walks, because they were
flatter and there was little traffic upon them in those days before the
motor car, and we could keep abreast and go on talking uninterruptedly.
That is to say, he could.

What talk it was!

Of all the virtues that the young should have. He spoke of courage and
how splendid it was to accustom oneself not even to feel fear; of truth,
and difficult cases when one might conceivably injure others by telling
the truth and so perhaps, perhaps qualify the rigor of one's integrity,
but how one should never hesitate to injure one's own self in that
matter. Then in another phase he talked of belief--and the
disagreeableness of dissenters. But here, I remember, there was a
discussion. I have forgotten how I put the thing, but in some boyish
phrasing or other I must have thrown out the idea that thought is free
and beliefs uncontrollable. What of conformity, if the truth was that
you doubted? "Not if you make an effort," I remember him saying, "not if
you make an effort. I have had my struggles. But if you say firmly to
yourself, the Church teaches this. If you dismiss mere carping and say
that."

"But suppose you can't," I must have urged.

"You can if you will," he said with a note near enthusiasm. "I have been
through all that. I did it. I dismissed doubts. I wouldn't listen. I
felt, _This won't do. All this leads nowhere._"

And he it was told me the classic story of that presumptuous schoolboy
who went to his Head Master and declared himself an atheist. There were
no dialectics but a prompt horse-whipping. "In after life," said Mr.
Siddons, with unctuous gratification, "he came to recognize that
thrashing as the very best thing that had ever happened to him. The
kindest thing."

"Yes," urged the obstinate rebel within me, "but--the Truth, that
fearless insistence on the Truth!"

I could, however, find nothing effective to say aloud, and Siddons
prevailed over me. That story made my blood boil, it filled me with an
anticipatory hatred of and hostility to Head Masters, and at the sa