son of the late Simon Sterne, and uncle, therefore, of Laurence, was one of the governors of Halifax Grammar School, and that he may have used his interest to obtain his nephew’s admission to the foundation as the grandson of a Halifax man, and so, constructively, a child of the parish.  But, be this as it may, it is more than probable that from the time when he was sent to Halifax School the whole care and cost of the boy’s education was borne by his Yorkshire relatives.  The Memoir says that, “by God’s care of me, my cousin Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to me, and sent me to the University, &c., &c.;” and it is to be inferred from this that the benevolent guardianship of Sterne’s uncle Richard (who died in 1732, the year before Laurence was admitted of Jesus College, Cambridge) must have been taken up by his son.  Of his school course—­though it lasted for over seven years—­the autobiographer has little to say; nothing, indeed, except that he “cannot omit mentioning” that anecdote with which everybody, I suppose, who has ever come across the briefest notice of Sterne’s life is familiar.  The schoolmaster “had the ceiling of the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there.  I, one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital letters, Lau.  Sterne for which the usher severely whipped me.  My master was very much hurt at this, and said before me that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment.  This expression made me forget the blows I had received.”  It is hardly to be supposed, of course, that this story is pure romance; but it is difficult, on the other hand, to believe that the incident has been related by Sterne exactly as it happened.  That the recorded prediction may have been made in jest—­or even in earnest (for penetrating teachers have these prophetic moments sometimes)—­is, of course, possible; but that Sterne’s master was “very much hurt” at the boy’s having been justly punished for an act of wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege of nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been a delusion of the humourist’s later years.  The extreme fatuity which it would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else.  On the whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a recently-caned boy; and that Sterne’s vanity, either then or afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into a serious prophecy.  In itself, however, the urchin’s freak was only too unhappily characteristic of the man.  The trick of befouling what was clean (and because it was clean) clung to him most tenaciously all his days; and many a fair white surface—­of humour, of fancy, or of sentiment—­was to be disfigured by him in after-years with stains and splotches in which we can all too plainly decipher the literary signature of Laurence Sterne.