Now my connection with the school had been very short and quite unsatisfactory. I was sent there as a very small boy, remained less than three years, and then went home sick. I had, in fact, an acute attack of pneumonia which carried away with it a nervous breakdown from which I had been suffering; and it was several years before my health became fully re-established. In consequence of this experience my views about the school were thereafter quite gloomy. I regarded the place as a religious forcing-house, a very dangerous sort of place for any boy to go, especially if he were inclined by nature toward religion. I habitually abused the school, and I even took the trouble to go back there and have a quarrel with Dr. Coit about something he had said or done which seemed to me to deserve the reprobation of all just men. I poured over him a few vitriolic letters; and I still believe that the right was on my side in the matter, though perhaps I was wrong to assume the rôle of the Angel of Retribution. It was at a date about twenty years after my leaving the school, and at the age of forty-odd, and through the medium of another and very severe illness, that my nature began to take up again the threads of St. Paul’s School influence, and to receive the ideas which Dr. Coit had been striving to convey, though in forms that would have been incomprehensible to himself. The school had somehow been carrying on its work within me through all these years. Youth is a game of blindman’s buff, a romp and struggle in which we hold on fiercely and shout loudly, but know less as to whom we are holding or who is holding us than we shall ever know again. As we grow older we get true glimpses of things far away; and recognize at a distance what we could never understand so long as we were at close quarters with it. Middle age draws some curtains down, but lifts others; and of all the new visions that come when youth is past, there is none more thrilling than that new vision of the familiar past which shows us what unsuspected powers were at play within us. This experience is necessary and useful to us; and only thus can we come to understand the incredible subtlety of human influence.