“I stayed in the house . . . you see, it seemed as if I couldn’t go anywhere else, until after the funeral. Then the lawyers told me that he had left me a hundred and fifty pounds in his will. It seemed to me a tremendous lot of money. I didn’t realise what a little way it would go; but it seemed to make my dreams possible. I would be a doctor, like him . . . as near like him as it was possible to be. That was my first idea; but then I remembered what he had told me, and decided that it would be better to become a chemist first. In that way I could make sure of my living. “I left Axcombe. It was necessary that I should go to some big city to study and more or less by accident I chose North Bromwich. It was a tremendous change for me who had lived all my life in the country: I was very lonely and awkward at first. But that wasn’t the worse of it. I began to discover my own ignorance: to see that, as a matter of fact, I knew nothing but the homely routine of the doctor’s surgery, the names of a few drugs and their doses, a smattering of Latin, and the botany of the local wild flowers. I knew nothing of life. I couldn’t even pull out a tooth without breaking it. “It came as an awful shock to me. I began to see the reasons of the doctor’s cautious advice. He realised that I had a great deal of the dreamer in me. I rather think that you have it too, Eddie. No doubt it comes to both of us from those strange, dark, mining-people. I saw that I should have to pull myself together and drive myself hard if my ambitions were not to end in disaster. I had to pinch and scrape. I had to set out and learn the most elementary things from the beginning. I had thought that my fortune was made. Perhaps it was a wise thing that the doctor had left me no more money. It taught me that nobody could make my fortune but myself. “It was a hard fight, I can tell you: for while I was building my schemes for the future I had to provide for the present. You see I had soon realised that it wouldn’t do to spend any of my little capital. I won’t tell you now how I lived. It would be too long a story. But I can assure you that I had a hard time in North Bromwich, getting all my dreams knocked out of me one by one, thirsting—literally thirsting for clean air and country ways. “It sounds rather like a tract, but it’s quite true to say that town life has a lot of temptations too for a country boy. I could see everywhere the power of money and the luxuries that money could purchase without realising the work that money represents, and all this was very disconcerting to a boy of my temperament with more than a hundred pounds in the bank. Still, as it happened, nothing went wrong. In the day-time I worked with my hands. At night I tried to educate myself, very slowly, very hardly—for in those days poor people had not the opportunities of education that are open to them in these. I sometimes wonder if people to-day realise the difference.