comfortable, though far from luxurious house, at Beaconsfield, just opposite the fourth tee. I have visited Barstoke again not very long since, and the good sisters were very kind to me. They had turned the billiard-room into a chapel, and broken up many of the larger rooms, so that I could hardly recognize them; but it is something to feel that the shell of the building remains, and is likely to remain, intact. And yet I could not be altogether at my ease there, for we like our earliest memories to remain undisturbed: and for me, though I have lived long since then and seen many cities and travelled far from my startingpoint, nothing will ever appeal again as the park did, and the lodge-gates, and the unwieldy tower of the village church beyond them, and the trees of Barstoke, and its fruit garden. CHAPTER II SCHOOL DAYS If the child is father of the man, so also is he, or rather is she, the mother of the woman.—ARCHDEACON BUNTING. The same change in our family fortunes which made it necessary for us to give up the old home at Barstoke made it necessary also for my parents to send me to school. It was only long afterwards that I realized what bitter heart-burnings this decision caused them, or what anxious discussions preceded it. To understand their reluctance, you have to remember that at the time of which I write no privilege of the governing classes was more tenaciously preserved than their exemption from education. The same instinct of struggle which bade the poor keep away from the workhouse bade the rich keep their children from school. My father in particular had often declared that no child of his should undergo the degradation of being taught so long as he could break stones to avoid it. But our case was really desperate; to keep me at home was almost beyond his means, quite apart from the grant of £200 which, on condition that I kept all my terms, would be paid to me annually for my attendance. My mother protested, indeed, that at fifteen I was far too young to be away from home; but in those days the objection did not carry the weight it would carry nowadays: you would still see poor little mites of ten or eleven being packed off to some place of education, with the knowledge that for eight long weeks they would never see their dolls and their toy horses again. Those were stern days, but I sometimes think the discipline was good for our character.