For days after that, hints, fragments, surmises floated as thickly about the school as motes of dust in a sunbeam. We were forbidden to talk about the subject at all, which gave an additional zest to discussion. Some knew a great deal, some knew a little, some knew nothing. Those who knew nothing learned a little, those who knew a little learned more, and we seethed with things that were unsavoury, because the secrecy and the prohibition made the unsavouriness of them.... But in heaven’s name, why could we not all have been given clean lessons in natural history? Is it better that young boys should guess and experiment and be left to find things out for themselves, with the gusto that arises from the notion of forbidden mysteries, than that they should be taught cleanness by their elders, instead of being left to experimentalize in dirtiness? Until there is extracted from boyhood its proper legitimate inquisitiveness which is the reason of its growth, nothing can prevent boys from seeking to learn about those things which its elders cover up in a silence so indiscreet as to be criminal. It is a libellous silence, for it surrounds, in an atmosphere of suspicion, knowledge which is perfectly wholesome and necessary. Between terms came holidays full of things just as wonderful as the swamping of the furnaces of the Havre boat and “Benson’s lies” generally, and these must be lumped together, to form a general summary as to how we amused ourselves for the next three years or so, when holidays brought us together. About now a joint literary effort of all us children, called (for no known reason) the _Saturday Magazine_, made its punctual appearance. Already we were such savage wielders of the pen that one issue every holidays no longer contented us, but two or three times between term and term my father and mother were regaled of an evening with a flood of prose and poetry. Arthur would say one morning, “Let’s have a Saturday Magazine next Tuesday,” and straightway we called for a supply of that useful paper known as “sermon paper,” which contains exactly twenty-three lines to a small quarto page, faintly ruled in blue. Dialogues, satirical sketches, tales of adventure, essays, and poems, were poured out in rank profusion, the rule being that each member of the family should contribute “at least” four pages of prose, or one page of verse. There was, after we had all got blooded with the lust of production, little cause for this minimum regulation, and perhaps it would have been better, in view of subsequent fruitfulness, to have substituted for the minimum restriction of “at least” a maximum restriction of “at most.” Yet this habit of swift composition gave us all a certain ease in expressing ourselves if only because we expressed ourselves so freely. The contents of the _Saturday Magazine_ were, since all choice of subject was left to the author, of the most varied description. Arthur would produce (at least) an essay in