If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking[11] in the class.  For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time.  I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability.  I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide[12] a crime.  But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant.  This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac,[13] and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life.  Suffice it to say this:  if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning.  Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country.  He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones.  A bird will sing in the thicket.  And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective.  Why, if this be not education, what is?  We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman[14] accosting such an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue:—­

“How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here?”

“Truly, sir, I take mine ease.”

“Is not this the hour of the class? and should’st thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?”

“Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave.”

“Learning, quotha!  After what fashion, I pray thee?  Is it mathematics?”

“No, to be sure.”

“Is it metaphysics?”

“Nor that.”

“Is it some language?”

“Nay, it is no language.”

“Is it a trade?”

“Nor a trade neither.”

“Why, then, what is’t?”

“Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff is of the best service.  Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment.”

Hereupon, Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise:  “Learning, quotha!” said he; “I would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman!”

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.