school within easy reach, and besides this, though I hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be considered as well as education in the choice of a school.  A child may take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but the London gamin is not a desirable acquaintance.  In this, as in other matters, I paid through the nose for my position; and the convention cost me a clear 35 pounds per annum.  Thus I calculated that out of a nominal income of 250 pounds per annum 100 pounds was paid as a tax to convention and respectability.

I have no doubt that a good many flaws may be found in these calculations; but one point is beyond dispute, viz., that a town income is always more apparent than real.  Money is worth no more than its purchasing power.  The business man who is offered 1000 pounds per annum in New York against 700 pounds per annum in London, refuses the offer unless it carries with it great contingent advantages, because he knows perfectly well that 700 pounds a year in London is worth a good deal more than 1000 pounds a year in New York.  But the same kind of prudent calculation is seldom applied to the case of town versus country living at home.  It is impossible to persuade the labourer that a pound a week in London is really less than fifteen shillings a week in the country.  Men are dazzled by mere figures, and there is no country clerk who would not jump at the idea of a fifty pounds a year rise in London, though ten minutes spent over a sum in addition and subtraction would be sufficient to assure him that he would not be enlarging his income but diminishing it.  A man has to live upon a certain scale suited to his needs and tastes, but the income which makes this kind of life possible is a variable quantity.  It is not by what men earn in the aggregate that their incomes should be measured, but by what they have left when the necessary cost of living is defrayed.  If it costs a man fifty pounds a year more to live in London than in the country, he is obviously no better off by the extra fifty pounds he earns in London.  He is not earning fifty pounds for himself but fifty pounds for the landlord, the rate-collector, the gas-man, the restaurant proprietor, the omnibus and railway companies.  His gold never reaches his own pocket; it is filched from him by dexterous thieves; it gleams before him for an instant like the coin spun in the air by the conjurer or thimble-rigger, and then vanishes for ever.  Yet I have found few men keen enough to penetrate the delusion; it would seem they love to be deluded, and by their conduct justify the satiric lines of Hudibras—­

  Doubtless the pleasure is as great
  To cheated be as ’tis to cheat.