Another grievous tendency which grows on me is an incapacity for idleness. That will amuse you, when you remember the long evenings at Eton which we used to spend in vacant talk. I remember so well your saying after tea one evening, in that poky room of yours with the barred windows at the end of the upper passage, "How delightful to think that there are four hours with nothing whatever to do!" Do you remember, too, that night when we sate at tea, blissfully, wholesomely tired after a college match? John and Ellen, those strange, gruff beings, came in to wash up, carrying that horrible, steaming can of tea-dregs in which our cups were plunged: they cleared the table as we sate; it was over before six, and it was not till the prayer-bell rang at 9.30 that we became aware we had sate the whole evening with the table between us. What DID we talk about? I wish to Heaven I could sit and talk like that now! That is another thing which grows upon me, my dislike of mere chatting: it is not priggish to say it, because I regret and abominate my stupidity in that respect. But there is nothing now which induces more rapid and more desperate physical fatigue than to sit still and know I have to pump up talk for an hour. The moral of all this is that YOU must take good care to form habits, and _I_ must take care to unform them. YOU must resist the temptation to read the papers, to stroll, to talk to your children; and _I_ must try to cultivate leisurely propensities. I think that, as a schoolmaster, one might do very good work as a peripatetic talker. I have a big garden here--to think that you have never seen it!--with a great screen of lilacs and some pleasant gravel walks. I never enter it, I am afraid. But if in the pleasant summer I could learn the art of sitting there, of having tea there, and making a few boys welcome if they cared to come, it would be good for all of us, and would give the boys some pleasant memories. I don't think there is anything gives me a pleasanter thrill than to recollect the times I spent as a boy in old Hayward's garden. He told me and Francis Howard that we might go and sit there if we liked. You were not invited, and I never dared to ask him. It was a pleasant little place, with a lawn surrounded with trees, and a summer-house full of armchairs, with an orchard behind it--now built over. Howard and I used at one time to go there a good deal, to read and talk. I remember him reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud, though I had not an idea what they were all about--but his rich, resonant voice comes back to me now; and then he showed me a MS. book of his own poems. Ye Gods, how great I thought them! I copied many of them out and have them still. Hayward used to come strolling about; I can see him standing there in a big straw hat, with his hands behind him, like the jolly old leisurely fellow he was. "Don't get up, boys," he used to say. Once or twice he sate with us, and talked lazily about some book we were reading.