But I am here, a lonely man, wondering and doubting and desiring I hardly know what.  Some nearness of life, some children of my own.  You are apt to think of yourself as shelved and isolated; yet, after all, you have the real thing—­wife, children, and home.  But, in my case, these boys who are dear to me have forgotten me already.  Disguise it as I will, I am part of the sordid furniture of life that they have so gladly left behind, the crowded corridor, the bare-walled schoolroom, the ink-stained desk.  They are glad to think that they have not to assemble to-morrow to listen to my prosing, to bear the blows of the uncle’s tongue, as Horace says.  They like me well enough—­for a schoolmaster; I know some of them would even welcome me, with a timorous joy, to their own homes.

I have had the feeling of my disabilities brought home to me lately in a special way.  There is a boy in my house that I have tried hard to make friends with.  He is a big, overgrown creature, with a perfectly simple manner.  He has innumerable acquaintances in the school, but only a very few friends.  He is amiable with every one, but guards his heart.  He is ambitious in a quiet way, and fond of books, and, being brought up in a cultivated home, he can talk more unaffectedly and with a more genuine interest about books than any boy I have ever met.  Well, I have done my best, as I say, to make friends with him.  I have lent him books; I have tried to make him come and see me; I have talked my best with him, and he has received it all with polite indifference; I can’t win his confidence, somehow.  I feel that if I were only not in the tutorial relation, it would be easy work.  But perhaps I frightened him as a little boy, perhaps I bored him; anyhow the advances are all on my side, and there seems a hedge of shyness through which I cannot break.  Sometimes I have thought it is simply a case of “crabbed age and youth,” and that I can’t put myself sufficiently in line with him.  I missed seeing him last night—­he was out at some school festivity, and this morning he has gone without a word or a sign.  I have made friends a hundred times with a tenth of the trouble, and I suppose it is just because I find this child so difficult to approach that I fret myself over the failure; and all the more because I know in my heart that he is a really congenial nature, and that we do think the same about many things.  Of course, most sensible people would not care a brass farthing about such an episode, and would succeed where I have failed, because I think it is the forcing of attentions upon him that this proud young person resents.  I must try and comfort myself by thinking that my very capacity for vexing myself over the business is probably the very thing which makes it easy as a rule for me to succeed.

Well, I must turn to my books and my bicycle and my writing for consolation, and to the blessed sense of freedom which luxuriates about my tired brain.  But books and art and the beauties of nature, I begin to have a dark suspicion, are of the nature of melancholy consolations for the truer stuff of life—­for friendships and loves and dearer things.