dates, stealing dates from battles and murders and great enactments—­even inventing dates, vacant years that were really no dates at all.  The things I have suffered—­prisons, scourgings, beating with rods, wild masters, in bounds often, a hundred lines often, standing on forms and holding out books often—­on account of these dates!  I knew, and knew well before I was fifteen, what these “heredity” babblers are only beginning to discover—­that the past is the curse of the present.  But I never knew my dates—­never.  And I marvel now that all little boys do not grow up to be Republicans, seeing how much they suffer for the mere memory of Kings.

Then there were pedigrees, and principal parts and conjugations, and county towns.  Every county had a county town, and it was always on a river.  Mr. Sandsome never allowed us a town without that colophon.  I remember in my early manhood going to Guildford on the Wey, and trying to find that unobtrusive rivulet.  I went over the downs for miles.  It is not only the Wey I have had a difficulty in finding.  There are certain verses—­Heaven help me, but I have forgotten them!—­about “i vel e dat” (was it dat?) “utrum malis”—­if I remember rightly—­and all that about amo, amas, amat.  There was a multitude of such things I acquired, and they lie now, in the remote box-rooms and lumber recesses of my mind, a rusting armoury far gone in decay.  I have never been able to find a use for them.  I wonder even now why Mr. Sandsome equipped me with them.  Yet he seemed to be in deadly earnest about this learning, and I still go in doubt.  In those early days he impressed me, chiefly in horizontal strips, with the profoundest respect for his mental and physical superiority.  I credited him then, and still incline to believe he deserved to be credited, with a sincere persuasion that unless I learnt these things I should assuredly go—­if I may be frank—­to the devil.  It may be so.  I may be living in a fool’s paradise, prospering—­like that wicked man the Psalmist disliked.  Some unsuspected gulf may open, some undreamt-of danger thrust itself through the phantasmagoria of the universe, and I may learn too late the folly of forgetting my declensions.

I remember Mr. Sandsome chiefly as sitting at his desk, in a little room full of boys, a humming hive whose air was thick with dust, as the slanting sunbeams showed.  When we were not doing sums or writing copies, we were always learning or saying lessons.  In the early morning Mr. Sandsome sat erect and bright, his face animated, his ruddy eyes keen and observant, the cane hanging but uncertainly upon its hook.  There was a standing up of classes, a babble of repetition, now and then a crisis.  How long the days were then!  I have heard that scientific people—­Professor C. Darwin is their leader, unless I err—­which probably I do, for names and dates I have hated from my youth up—­say the days grow longer.  Anyhow, whoever says it, it is quite wrong.  But as the lank hours of that vast schooltime drawled on, Mr. Sandsome lost energy, drooped like a flower,—­especially if the day was at all hot,—­his sandy hair became dishevelled, justice became nerveless, hectic, and hasty.  Finally came copybooks; and yawns and weird rumblings from Mr. Sandsome.  And so the world aged to the dinner-hour.