The natural end to such schooldays as mine was expulsion.  I was expelled when I was sixteen, for idleness and general worthlessness.  I returned to a wild country home, where I found my father engaged in training racehorses.  For a nature of such intense vitality as mine, an ambition, an aspiration of some sort was necessary; and I now, as I have often done since, accepted the first ideal to hand.  In this instance it was the stable.  I was given a hunter, I rode to hounds every week, I rode gallops every morning, I read the racing calendar, stud-book, latest betting, and looked forward with enthusiasm to the day when I should be known as a successful steeplechase rider.  To ride the winner of the Liverpool seemed to me a final achievement and glory; and had not accident intervened, it is very possible that I might have succeeded in carrying off, if not the meditated honour, something scarcely inferior, such as—­alas, eheu fugaces! I cannot now recall the name of a race of the necessary value and importance.  About this time my father was elected Member of Parliament; our home was broken up, and we went to London.  But an ideal set up on its pedestal is not easily displaced, and I persevered in my love, despite the poor promises London life held out for its ultimate attainment; and surreptitiously I continued to nourish it with small bets made in a small tobacconist’s.  Well do I remember that shop, the oily-faced, sandy-whiskered proprietor, his betting-book, the cheap cigars along the counter, the one-eyed nondescript who leaned his evening away against the counter, and was supposed to know some one who knew Lord ——­’s footman, and the great man often spoken of, but rarely seen—­he who made “a two-’undred pound book on the Derby”; and the constant coming and going of the cabmen—­“Half an ounce of shag, sir.”  I was then at a military tutor’s in the Euston Road; for, in answer to my father’s demand as to what occupation I intended to pursue, I had consented to enter the army.  In my heart I knew that when it came to the point I should refuse—­the idea of military discipline was very repugnant, and the possibility of an anonymous death on a battlefield could not be accepted by so self-conscious a youth, by one so full of his own personality.  I said Yes to my father, because the moral courage to say No was lacking, and I put my trust in the future, as well I might, for a fair prospect of idleness lay before me, and the chance of my passing any examination was, indeed, remote.

In London I made the acquaintance of a great blonde man, who talked incessantly about beautiful women, and painted them sometimes larger than life, in somnolent attitudes, and luxurious tints.  His studio was a welcome contrast to the spitting and betting of the tobacco shop.  His pictures—­Dore-like improvisations, devoid of skill, and, indeed, of artistic perception, save a certain sentiment for the grand and noble—­filled me with wonderment and