The prospectus said that “the busy baby fingers” were “trained from the first to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality” which, I was to find out, was merely a polite paraphrase of the good old expression “unmitigated hell.” Every morning a dire conveyance locally known as the “White Maria,” drawn by two rusty, long-haired bay ponies and driven by Mr. White who was likewise long-haired, rusty and bay, careened up to our door at half-past eight and shortly afterwards, depending on the length of time it had taken to extricate me from the banisters of the front stairs among which I had entangled my arms and legs and between which I had thrust my head in order to render my removal as difficult and painful as possible for all concerned, my father would emerge from the house flushed, panting but triumphant with me, screaming, kicking but defeated in his arms. He would then transport me, still howling, to the White Maria, thrust me in, slam the door (it opened at the back) and return to exclaim to my mother, “I really don’t see how we can keep this up much longer.” Once inside the White Maria the busy baby fingers began straightway to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality by transforming the dusky interior into a veritable black hole of Calcutta. I slapped faces, pulled hair, kicked shins, threw lunch-baskets on the floor and stamped upon their contents, while the other children, goaded on to madness and piercing shrieks, ran amuck and did the same. Mr. White never interfered with this perambulating inferno both because he was of an incorrigible cheerfulness--the result of a severe sunstroke--and because he couldn’t see it. As one of Mrs. White’s specialties was the observation of nature in all its various, ever pleasing and instructive moods, the superstructure of the White Maria was a kind of limousine of black oilcloth that at any season of the year effectually shut out air, light, the passing landscape and also Mr. White. The “precious freight” (as Mrs. White called us) within could therefore dismember one another undisturbed. After stopping at several more houses to recruit our spent legions we finally arrived at the school, furious, tearful, disheveled, hating life as we have never hated it since, and proceeded at once to praise God in song and thank Him for our manifold and inscrutable blessings. “Oh, blesséd work, Oh, blesséd play, We thank thee for Another day,” was the mendacious refrain of every stanza. When sufficiently irritated by anything I can still sometimes remember the tune. Later in the morning we were supplied with round flat disks like poker chips and again burst reluctantly into melody, exclaiming this time, as we shied the disks into a basket on the floor, “Did you ever, ever play Skipping pebbles on the bay, On the [something-or-other] water?”