I think I may relate one other curious incident among his public school experiences:  it may seem very incredible, but I have his word for it that it is true.

“A sixth-form boy took a fancy to me, and let me sit in his room, and helped me in my work.  The night before he left the school I was sitting there, and just before I went away, being rather overcome with regretful sentiments, he caught hold of me by the arm and said, among other things, ’And now that I am going away, and shall probably never see you again, I don’t believe you care one bit.’  I don’t know how I came to do it,” he said, “because I was never demonstrative; but I bent down and kissed him on the cheek, and then blushed up to my ears.  He let me go at once; he was very much astonished, and I think not a little pleased; but it was certainly a curious incident.”

During this time his intellectual development was proceeding slowly.  “I went through three phases,” he said.  “I began by a curious love for pastoral and descriptive poetry.  I read Thomson and Cowper, similes from ‘Paradise Lost,’ and other selections of my own; I read Tennyson, and revelled in the music of the lines and words.  I intended to be a poet.

“Then I became omnivorous, and read everything, whether I understood it or not, especially biographies.  I spent all my spare time in the school library; one only valuable thing have I derived from that—­a capacity for taking in the sense of a page at a glance, and having a verbal memory of a skimmed book for an hour or two superior to any one that I ever met.”

Then there came an ebb, and he read nothing, but loafed all day, and tried to talk.  He had a notion he said, that he could argue Socratically; and he was always trying to introduce metaphors into his conversation.  But his remarks in a much later letter to a friend on childish reading are so pertinent that I introduce them here.

“Never take a book away from a child unless it is positively vicious; that they should learn how to read a book and read it quickly is the great point; that they should get a habit of reading, and feel a void without it, is what should be cultivated.  Never mind if it is trash now; their tastes will insensibly alter.  I like a boy to cram himself with novels; a day will come when he is sick of them, and rejects them for the study of facts.  What we want to give a child is ‘bookmindedness,’ as some one calls it.  They will read a good deal that is bad, of course; but innocence is as slippery as a duck’s back; a boy really fond of reading is generally pure-minded enough.  When you see a robust, active, out-of-door boy deeply engrossed in a book, then you may suspect it if you like, and ask him what he has got; it will probably have an animal bearing.”

Friendships more or less ardent, butterfly-hunting, school games, constant visits to the cathedral for service, to which he was always keenly devoted, uneventful holidays, filled up most of his school life.  His letters at this date are very ordinary; his early precocity seemed, rather to the delight of his parents, to have vanished.  He was not a prig, though rather exclusive; not ungenial, though retiring.  “A dreadful boy,” he writes of himself, “who is as mum as a mouse with his elders, and then makes his school friends roar with laughter in the passage:  dumb at home, a chatterbox at school.”