in whose
shadow he has spent many hours reading old books at the stalls in
Holywell Street, and the 'bus races along Cannon Street, is brought up
almost on its hind wheels at the Mansion House Corner, and the author
gets a brief glimpse of Princes Street and Moorgate Street, where he
was once "something in the City" as we used to say, before the
policeman's hand is lowered and the eastbound traffic roars along
Threadneedle Street and so down to Aldgate, where the author descends
by the famous Pump, to begin the serious business of the day. For it
must not be forgotten that this daily 'bus-ride from Charing Cross to
Aldgate Pump is not prosecuted in a spirit of sentimental reverie. The
author is going to school. Across the road may be seen a building
athwart whose topmost window runs a tarnished gold sign _Teague's
School of Engineering_, only all three ns of the last word are
missing, which seems in keeping with the name Teague somehow, and
gives the whole affair a touch of Irish dissipation. Nothing, however,
could be more misleading. Upstairs, four flights, the last two
uncarpeted or linoleumed, one discovers only an austere establishment
from which both Teague and his possible dissipation are long since
departed. The business is now owned by a dapper young man of pleasing
exterior and almost uncanny technical omniscience, who for a lump
inclusive fee undertakes to pull the most illiterate of seafarers
through the narrow portals of the government examination. He gives
that impression as he sits at his desk in his private office, the
cuffs of his grey frock-coat and his starched white shirt drawn up out
of the way. He has the capable air of a surgeon, the swift, impersonal
competence of an experienced _accoucheur_. His business is to get
results. It is not too much to say that he gets them.

In the room beyond, however, in which the author takes his seat in the
humble capacity of student, there is the curiously strained atmosphere
that is to be found in all companies of disparate personalities
intent upon a common end. Seated in rows at a number of pine desks are
a score of men whose ages range from twenty-three to forty-five. Some
are smoking. Others, with tongue protruding slightly from the corner
of the mouth, and head on one side, are slowly and painfully copying
the drawing of a pump or a valve-box. Others, again, are in the
murky depths of vast arithmetical solutions extracting, with heavy
breathings, the cube r