ry finest spun
silk of sound; a tremendous traffic in victual began and I was the
trusted friend of the family.

Then one morning I was filled with amazement and anguish. There was a
rock torn down and lying in the path; a paw had gone up to that little
warm place. Across the gravel, shreds of the nest and a wisp or so of
down were scattered. I could imagine the brief horrors of that night
attack. I started off, picking up stones as I went, to murder that sandy
devil, the stable cat. I got her once--alas! that I am still glad to
think of it--and just missed her as she flashed, a ginger streak,
through the gate into the paddock.

"_Now_ Steve! Now!" came Mr. Siddons' voice behind me....

How can one explain things of that sort to a man like Siddons? I took my
lecture on the Utter Caddishness of Wanton Cruelty in a black rebellious
silence. The affair and my own emotions were not only far beyond my
powers of explanation, but far beyond my power of understanding. Just
then my soul was in shapeless and aimless revolt against something
greater and higher and deeper and darker than Siddons, and his
reproaches were no more than the chattering of a squirrel while a storm
uproots great trees. I wanted to kill the cat. I wanted to kill whatever
had made that cat.

Sec. 5

Mr. Siddons it was who first planted the conception of Life as a Career
in my mind.

In those talks that did so much towards shaping me into the likeness of
a modest, reserved, sporting, seemly, clean and brave, patriotic and
decently slangy young Englishman, he was constantly reverting to that
view of existence. He spoke of failures and successes, talked of
statesmen and administrators, peerages and Westminster Abbey. "Nelson,"
he said, "was once a clergyman's son like you."

"England has been made by the sons of the clergy."

He talked of the things that led to failure and the things that had made
men prominent and famous.

"Discursiveness ruins a man," I remember him saying. "Choose your goal
and press to it."

"Never do anything needlessly odd. It's a sort of impertinence to all
the endless leaders of the past who created our traditions. Do not
commit yourself hastily to opinions, but once you have done so, stick to
them. The world would far rather have a firm man wrong, than a weak man
hesitatingly right. Stick to them."

"One has to remember," I recall him meditating, far over my head with
his face upturned, "that Institutions are more imp