“My father was, I should say, below the average in capacity for friendship.  He liked young girls, and was never interested in boys.  He was a man of strongly Puritanical morality, capable of condemning with gloomy bitterness.  He was also a man capable of great sacrifice for principle, and mentally very well endowed.  My mother was a clever, practical woman, with wide sympathies.  She was capable of warm friendship, especially toward those younger than herself.  Her father (whom I never saw) was a teacher.  He was devoted to his wife, but also delighted in the company of young men.  He had always some young man on his arm, my mother would tell me.  My mother’s family is of Welsh descent.  I learned to read at 5, and I can scarcely have been more than 6 when I used to read again and again David’s lament for Absalom.  Even now I can dimly recall the siren charm for me of that melancholy refrain, ‘O my son Absalom....  O Absalom, my son, my son!’ Of late, when I have thought of the amount of devotion I have shown to lads, and the amount I have sometimes suffered for them, I have felt as if there were something almost weirdly prophetic in that early incident.

    “I was always an impressionable creature.  My mother was very
    musical, and her singing ‘got hold’ of me wonderfully.  The
    dramatic and the poetic always strongly appealed to me.

“I felt I should like to act; but I never dared.  In the same way I felt that one day I should like to be a schoolmaster, but I dared not say so.  A shy, retiring creature was obviously unfitted for such occupations.  Well, the teaching came about, and the strange part was that the boys were somehow or other attracted by me, and the ‘worst’ customers were attracted most.  And there came a chance of acting too.  Owing to some difficulties about the cast in a play at school, I took a part.  After that I knew that (within a certain range) I could act.  I spent two holidays with a dramatic company.  I should undoubtedly have remained on the stage, but for one thing.  I don’t wish to be sanctimonious, but dirty and ugly jokes are odious to me.  It was this sort of thing that drove me away.  I threw myself into the school work instead.

“It was partly the dramatic interest, partly a quite genuine interest in human nature, that led me to do some preaching too.  When I had been badly hurt by one or two youngsters whom I loved, I thought of going in for pastoral work, but this too was given up—­and very wisely.  I should never be able to work comfortably with any organization.  For one thing I have a way of taking on new ideas, and organizations do not like that.  For another, all social functions are anathema to me.

“Interest in ‘art’ as usually understood began to be marked only after I was 30.  It started with architecture and passed on to painting and sculpture.  The tendency to do rather a variety (too great a variety) of