So much for calf-love; but now for a more important matter. I left the Grammar School at S----, at the age when boys usually go to their Harrow and Winchester, as well equipped, I daresay, as most boys of my years; for with the rudiments I had been fairly diligent, and with some of them even had become expert. I was well grounded in Latin and French grammar, and in English literature was far ahead of boys much older than myself. Looking back now upon the drilling I had at S----, I consider it was well done; but I have to set against the benefits I got from the system the fact that I had much privacy and all the chance which that gives a boy to educate himself withal. My school hours limited my intercourse with the school world. Before and after them I could develop at my own pace and in my own way--and I did. I believe that when I went to my great school I had the makings of an interesting lad in me; but I declare upon my conscience that it was that place only which checked the promise for ten years or more, and might have withered it altogether. My father was an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursed in his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of the International Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful planting of foreign stock in England after that, and one of its weedy saplings was an International Education Company, which out of a magniloquent prospectus and some too-confident shareholders bore one fruit, the London International College at Spring Grove. It never came to maturity, and is now dropped and returned to the ground of all such schemes. I suppose it had been on the stalk some fifteen years when I went to feed of it.