"He began to die when I was not quite six, and he went on dying and at the same time investing money until I was nearly eight. Imagine it! A great big man, as irritable as a child, slowly rotting away inside with cancer and two helpless little children, one a baby. All the time it was doctor after doctor, each one recommending a different cure; all the time it was investment after investment, the estate getting more and more entangled. He went to Baden one autumn and came home worse. He tried Harrogate in the spring, but it was no use. He came back, went to bed and never rose from it. Mind you, all the time the cancer was eating his body, this other cancer was at his mind. He plunged into the craziest schemes for getting twenty per cent. interest. Nothing my mother could say was able to make him see the madness of it. She wanted him to buy land, but he said no one but a fool would buy land unless they had a fortune to keep it up. At last, one January, it was over and done with. He died, and we had a grand funeral, and the real business of life began for us. "For me it took a shape that I never got used to for all the years I was kept at it--school. For the life of me I can't see what use it was to me or to anyone else. What does a child learn at school that's of any use to him? You'll think I am talking like an ignorant fool, I dare say, but hear me out. Between eight and seventeen I went to six different schools. The country in those days was spotted with them. Some were called colleges, some academies, one was called an 'Ecole' of something or other. Each one I went to had a different badge, a different coloured tassel, a different set of rules and subjects. Barring the last one, which was down in Essex, near Maldon, they were simply swindles. A mile from our house was a board-school, but it would not have been keeping up our position to send me there. I learned to read and write, but, Great God! curiosity will make a child do that. If he isn't curious to learn what's the use of him learning? He just forgets it, as I forgot it, as you did too very likely, forgot it and learned it again when you needed to. A child ought to be outdoors learning the names of flowers and trees and birds. I know what I'm talking about, mind! You may fancy that if a boy is going into the professions as I was to go, as I did go, he ought to be schooled. Well, when I entered my profession at seventeen, I had to begin at the bottom for all my schooling. I know as much of 'professions' as most men, and I say of schools, I have no faith in them. The men who teach them know nothing. They're frauds and they know it. All that these schools did for me was to teach me the importance of keeping up a position.