Yet I have never met a more contented man. He doesn't regard teaching as anything but a sinecure: his main occupation in life is travel. He is rather like a city clerk who goes up to his office every day solely in order to earn enough to take a holiday. The difference lies in the fact that Stockton gets his reward three times a year, the clerk only once; the master gets three months, the clerk (with luck) three weeks. I suppose that I may regard myself as exactly the opposite of Stockton in every way. I live for my work: he lives for his holidays. When the term is over I love to get away principally because Radchester would be intolerable once the boys were gone, secondly because I want to fill myself up with new ideas, to develop my theory that the cult of beauty and imagination is the whole duty of the schoolmaster. I rarely forget the school in the holidays. All the time that I am exploring new scenes I am storing up memories which I hope to use in my work. All my talks with Stapleton during these last few weeks have been so much sifting of matter which I want to get clear before I start on a new term. The difficulty is that so few of the men in Common Room think it necessary to do more than prepare the textbooks they propose to read with their forms, while I read up all I can on social problems. I strive to discover new methods of interesting boys in the conditions of life outside school. In so doing I am frequently attacked on the ground that I am making them restless and dissatisfied with their narrow round at school. I am not certain that restlessness is a thing to be condemned: unless you are discontented with abuses you will never stir a finger to reform them, and unless a boy leaves school firmly convinced that it is his duty to leave the world better than he found it, education means nothing. Stapleton has gone back to work reinvigorated, fully determined to bear with the many thorns in his flesh, in the shape of irritating curates, the dead weight of indifference to religion, morality, or high ideals in the bulk of his parishioners, with notes for a dozen sermons in his head, and a healthy conviction that in spite of temporary setbacks the world really is progressing. I return to Radchester determined to alter for the better the code of morality of the school, to make boys see that work is not a disgraceful thing to be avoided whenever possible, but the only means by which any one can equip himself to fight the battle of life: I return determined to live at peace with my colleagues so far as it is possible, to be more sociable and less critical, to dwell more insistently upon the things that matter, and to try to wean away my boys from spending themselves upon unworthy objects, to foster a love for all that is pure and good and holy and to appreciate the millions of manifestations of Beauty that nature displays even at Radchester for our spiritual delectation. VII _June 4, 1911_