The first epoch of his fatherless life closed when our "Temporary Gentleman" left school, at the age of fifteen, and mounted a stool in the office of a local auctioneer and estate agent, who, in the previous decade, had had satisfactory business dealings with the youth's father. This notable event introduced some change into the quiet little mother-ruled _ménage_; for, in a sense, it had to be recognised that, with the bringing home of his first week's pay, the boy threatened to become a man. The patient mother was at once proud and a little disconcerted. But, upon the whole, pride ruled. The boy's mannishness, brought up as he had been, did not take on any very disconcerting shapes, though the first cigarette he produced in the house, not very long after the conclusion of the South African War, did prove something of a disturbing element just at first. The South African War affected this little household, perhaps, as much as it would have been affected by a disastrous famine in China. It came before the period at which the son of the house started bringing home an evening newspaper, and while the only periodicals to enter the home were still _The Boy's Own Paper_ and a weekly journal concerned with dressmaking and patterns. As a topic of conversation it was not mentioned half a dozen times in that household from first to last. The next really great event in the life of the auctioneer's clerk was his purchase of a bicycle, which, whilst catastrophic in its effect upon his Post Office Savings Bank account, was in other respects a source of great happiness to him. And if it meant something of a wrench to his mother, as a thing calculated to remove her boy a little farther beyond the narrow confines of the sphere of her exclusive domination, she never allowed a hint of this to appear. Her son's admirable physique had long been a source of considerable pride to her; and she had wisely encouraged his assiduity in the Polytechnic gymnasium of which he was a valued supporter. For the youth himself, his bicycle gave him the key of a new world, whilst robbing the cricket and football clubs to which he belonged of a distinctly useful member. He became an amateur of rural topography, learned in all the highways and by-ways of the southern Home Counties. His radius may not have exceeded fifty miles, but yet his bicycle interpreted England to him in a new light, as something infinitely greater and more beautiful than Brixton.