My father because of ill-health had retired from active work in his parish and lived in a pretty house (it is at present the Presbyterian College) surrounded by a high wall and separated from the Castle grounds by a wicket-gate. All through my College days I lived the Sandymount Castle life. It was my Capua and only too welcome after my school life. I had been braced too tight, now I was braced too lightly: self-abandoned to a complete relaxation. I left that school, weakened morally by its constant discipline and vigilance, to live all my College days in that pleasant Capua. I did not think, I did not work, I had no ambition, I dreamed. Week after week went by, and no one criticised. As far as the demands of that sympathetic circle went, I satisfied everybody, and was well-behaved. The only thing that ever troubled my uncle was my habit of going long walks in the mountains, all by myself. His old-fashioned, eighteenth century gregarious worldliness was shocked that I should walk all by myself, it seemed to him abnormal and he distrusted the abnormal. At school I had been well grounded as regards Latin and Greek, therefore the ordinary college examinations gave me no trouble. In my last year I read for honours in metaphysics and logic, but on the days of the examination I was ill with rheumatic fever. Possibly had I read sternly for these courses I should have turned away to the abstract side of life and deserted, for good and all, the concrete world of colour and of images. After taking my degree I won a prize in political economy, and became acquainted with the works of J. S. Mill, and I began to think; but though Capua vanished, I do not think that I thereby became a better man. Certainly I was more disagreeable, for I wanted to quarrel with everyone, making the mistake, common among polemical minded people, of thinking that when I was severe to other people and the world generally, I was severe to myself, although in reality I was acquiring the most disagreeable of qualities, picking up the habits of dictatorial emphasis & dogmatism, which I shall now never get rid of. This was not due to Mill's teaching. Mill must have been the most persuasive man, while I in my crudeness must have been the most dissuasive. Never would he have allowed any authoritative self-conceit to come between him and the truth. I once had the good fortune to hear him make a speech to workingmen, and I thought that both as a speaker and a man he was of all men the most winning. His audience did not cheer, they laughed as with an intensity of enjoyment. At the time I compared the laughter in my own mind to the sound made by the stringing of Ulysses' bow when he was about to shoot the suitors, which Homer likened to the singing of swallows. My own excuse for myself is that I lived for six years under that severe Scotch school-master, who was all authority and self-assertion, and that man is essentially an imitative animal. When I