such is man's inheritance. But for the
present, until we get a mastery of those vague and mighty intimations at
once so perplexing and so reassuring, if we are to live at all in the
multitudinousness of human society we must submit to some scheme of
clumsy compromises and conventions or other,--and for us Strattons the
Harbury system is the most convenient. You will have to go to the old
school.

I went to Rendle's. I just missed getting into college; I was two places
below the lowest successful boy. I was Maxton's fag to begin with, and
my chief chum was Raymond, who is your friend also, and who comes so
often to this house. I preferred water to land, boats to cricket,
because of that difficulty about pitch I have already mentioned. But I
was no great sportsman. Raymond and I shared a boat, and spent most of
the time we gave to it under the big trees near Dartpool Lock, reading
or talking. We would pull up to Sandy Hall perhaps once a week. I never
rowed in any of the eights, though I was urged to do so. I swam fairly
well, and got my colors on the strength of my diving.

On the whole I found Harbury a satisfactory and amusing place, I was
neither bullied nor do I think I greatly bullied, and of all that
furtive and puerile lasciviousness of which one hears so many hints
nowadays--excitable people talk of it as though it was the most
monstrous and singular of vices instead of a slightly debasing but
almost unavoidable and very obvious result of heaping boys together
under the inefficient control of a timid pretentious class of men--of
such uncleanness as I say, scarcely more than a glimpse and a whisper
and a vague tentative talk or so reached me. Little more will reach you,
for that kind of thing, like the hells of Swedenborg, finds its own.

I had already developed my growing instinct for observance to a very
considerable extent under Siddons, and at Harbury I remember myself, and
people remember me, as an almost stiffly correct youth. I was pretty
good at most of the work, and exceptionally so at history, geology, and
the biological side of natural science. I had to restrain my interest in
these latter subjects lest I should appear to be a "swat," and a
modern-side swat at that. I was early in the sixth, and rather a
favorite with old Latimer. He incited me to exercise what he called a
wholesome influence on the younger boys, and I succeeded in doing this
fairly well without any gross interventions. I implied rat