When I had been home—­it was a day school, for my aunt, who had an appetite for such things, knew that boarding-schools were sinks of iniquity—­and returned, I had Mr. Sandsome at another phase.  He had dined—­for we were simple country folk.  The figurative suggestions of that “phase” are irresistible—­the lunar quality.  May I say that Mr. Sandsome was at his full?  We now stood up, thirty odd of us altogether, to read, reading out of books in a soothing monotone, and he sat with his reading-book before him, ruddy as the setting sun, and slowly, slowly settling down.  But now and then he would jerk back suddenly into staring wakefulness as though he were fishing—­with himself as bait—­for schoolboy crimes in the waters of oblivion—­and fancied a nibble.  That was a dangerous time, full of anxiety.  At last he went right under and slept, and the reading grew cheerful, full of quaint glosses and unexpected gaps, leaping playfully from boy to boy, instead of travelling round with a proper decorum.  But it never ceased, and little Hurkley’s silly little squeak of a voice never broke in upon its mellow flow. (It took a year for Hurkley’s voice to break.) Any such interruption and Mr. Sandsome woke up and into his next phase forthwith—­a disagreeable phase always, and one we made it our business to postpone as long as possible.

During that final period, the last quarter, Mr. Sandsome was distinctly malignant.  It was hard to do right; harder still to do wrong.  A feverish energy usually inspired our government.  “Let us try to get some work done,” Mr. Sandsome would say—­and I have even known him teach things then.  More frequently, with a needless bitterness, he set us upon impossible tasks, demanding a colossal tale of sums perhaps, scattering pens and paper and sowing the horrors of bookkeeping, or chastising us with the scorpions of parsing and translation.  And even in wintry weather the little room grew hot and stuffy, and we terminated our schoolday, much exhausted, with minds lax, lounging attitudes, and red ears.  What became of Mr. Sandsome after the giving-out of home-work, the concluding prayer, and the aftermath of impositions, I do not know.  I stuffed my books, such as came to hand—­very dirty they were inside, and very neat out with my Aunt Charlotte’s chintz covers—­into my green baize bag, and went forth from the mysteries of schooling into the great world, up the broad white road that went slanting over the Down.

I say “the mysteries of schooling” deliberately.  I wondered then, I wonder still, what it was all for.  Reading, almost my only art, I learnt from Aunt Charlotte; a certain facility in drawing I acquired at home and took to school, to my own undoing.  “Undoing,” again, is deliberate—­it was no mere swish on the hand, gentle reader.  But the things I learnt, more or less partially, at school, lie in my mind, like the “Sarsen” stones of Wiltshire—­great, disconnected, time-worn chunks amidst the natural