Chesterfield is one of the grimiest and most hideous of towns on the borders of Derbyshire and Yorkshire. My pupil was a slack, good-for-nothing, over-affluent, overgrown youth who had to pass in English, knowing none. His father, who was a colliery owner, happened also to be a Director of Education for the county, and was anxious to know what education really meant. He had read Huxley, Spencer and Darwin, and no one else. I asked him to come along and join his son and the three of us went through the history of English literature from Shakespeare to the present day. The father was really interested, the son frankly bored. In mathematics the boy knew far more than I did, but he could not frame an English sentence for any money. Neither could he see the use of poetry, drama, novel or essay. I was taken to the Corporation Baths, I was motored all over the place, I encountered some of the rudest people I have ever met in my life, and I was thoroughly miserable for ten whole days in a house which "stank" of money and where everything was uncomfortable and wrong. Work was the only relief. The abjectness of the shops and the people's faces threatened to drive me mad, so great was the contrast between Chesterfield and my Devon home. How any one could live for choice in an ugly misbegotten place like this I can't think. It seemed to me to invite crime or at least criminal thoughts. The meals were one long unendurable agony: high tea of pine-apple, blancmange and tinned salmon at 5.45, 7.30 or 8.45, according as "the master" returned from work. I went hungry most days. After a day I found myself studying this new type closely: the father collects the most evil oil-paintings and the most exquisite old oak furniture. They have a pigsty in the front garden, which occupies their spare hours. The old man is deeply religious, very methodical, Liberal in politics, very quiet, very anxious not to spend money, as honest as the day, fond of power and passionately devoted to his son. He keeps a journal containing a list of all the books he reads and his opinions of them. I went into barracks at Exeter for a few days before returning to Ilfracombe, to keep my hand in, but I was chafing all the time to get back to the sea and freedom. The convention of mess is only less nauseating than that of Common Room.