eyed my garmented
being in mirrors and was trained to feel the "awfulness" of various
other small boys who appeared transitorily in the smaller Park when Lady
Ladislaw extended her wide hospitality to certain benevolent London
associations. Their ill-fitting clothing, their undisciplined outcries,
their slouching, their bad throwing and defective aspirates were made
matters for detestation in my plastic mind. Those things, I was assured,
placed them outside the pale of any common humanity.

"Very unfortunate and all that," said Mr. Siddons, "and uncommonly good
of Lady Ladislaw to have them down. But dirty little cads, Stephen,
dirty little cads; so don't go near 'em if you can help it."

They played an indecent sort of cricket with coats instead of a wicket!

Mr. Siddons was very grave about games and the strict ritual and proper
apparatus for games. He believed that Waterloo was won by the indirect
influence of public school cricket--disregarding many other contributory
factors. We did not play very much, but we "practised" sedulously at a
net in the paddock with the gardener and the doctor's almost grown-up
sons. I thought missing a possible catch was an impropriety. I
studiously maintained the correct attitude, alert and elastic, while I
was fielding. Moreover I had a shameful secret, that I did not really
know where a ball ought to pitch. I wasn't clear about it and I did not
dare to ask. Also until I was nearly thirteen I couldn't bowl overarm.
Such is the enduring force of early suggestion, my dear son, that I feel
a faint twinge of shame as I set this down for your humiliated eyes. But
so it was. May you be more precocious!

Then I was induced to believe that I really liked hunting and killing
things. In the depths of my being I was a gentle and primitive savage
towards animals; I believed they were as subtle and wise as myself and
full of a magic of their own, but Mr. Siddons nevertheless got me out
into the south Warren, where I had often watched the rabbits setting
their silly cock-eared sentinels and lolloping out to feed about
sundown, and beguiled me into shooting a furry little fellow-creature--I
can still see its eyelid quiver as it died--and carrying it home in
triumph. On another occasion I remember I was worked up into a ferocious
excitement about the rats in the old barn. We went ratting, just as
though I was Tom Brown or Harry East or any other of the beastly little
models of cant and cruelty we