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Title: The Boy I Left Behind Me
Author: Leacock, Stephen Butler (1869-1944)
Date of first publication: 1946
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1946
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 4 October 2010
Date last updated: 4 October 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #632

This ebook was produced by:
Marcia Brooks, Alison Hadwin, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                         THE BOY I LEFT
                           BEHIND ME




                         OTHER BOOKS BY
                       _STEPHEN LEACOCK_


  Montreal
  My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches
  The Greatest Pages of American Humor
  The Greatest Pages of Charles Dickens
  Charles Dickens  Wet Wit and Dry Humour
  Laugh with Leacock  Afternoons in Utopia
  Back to Prosperity
  Economic Prosperity in the British Empire
  The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
  Short Circuits  Winnowed Wisdom
  The Garden of Folly  College Days
  Over the Footlights
  My Discovery of England
  Winsome Winnie
  The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
  Frenzied Fiction
  The Hohenzollerns in America
  Further Foolishness
  Essays and Literary Studies
  Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
  Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
  Behind the Beyond
  Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
  Nonsense Novels  Literary Lapses
  Elements of Political Science




  THE BOY I LEFT
  BEHIND ME

  BY

  STEPHEN LEACOCK

  DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
  GARDEN CITY   1946   NEW YORK




  COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY MAY SHAW
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
  AT
  THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
  FIRST EDITION




PUBLISHER'S NOTE


_At the time of his death in March 1944 Stephen Leacock had completed
four chapters of memoirs which were to have been the beginning of
his autobiography. It is a distinct loss that the full, rounded
autobiography can never be written, but as Dr. Leacock's own record of
his early years from childhood to young manhood these few chapters are
a completely unified and delightful whole. It was his own idea to call
the autobiography "My Memories and What I Think" and the title would
be as truly descriptive of the little book presented here. However, as
it has perforce been narrowed to his youth, in the long look back from
his seventies, we think he would have liked our title_, The Boy I Left
Behind Me.




CONTENTS


  _There Will Always
  Be an England_,                     9

  _Life on the Old Farm_,            47

  _My Education
  and What I Think of It Now_,      105

  _Teaching School_,                151




THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND


I was born in Victorian England on December thirtieth in 1869, which
is exactly the middle year of Queen Victoria's reign. If I were
analyzed by one of those scientific French biographers who take full
account of the time, the place, the circumstance, or by the new school
of psychologists who study "behaviour," I imagine much could be made
of this. As expressed in a plain sense, I am certain that I have never
got over it.

I was born at Swanmore, which is a hamlet and parish on "Waltham
Chase" in Hampshire. They use names like that in Hampshire because
it is so old; it doesn't say who chased who: they may have forgotten.
Anyway, it is a mile and a half from Bishop's Waltham, which is ten
miles from Winchester and of which details may be had by consulting
Domesday Book, though of course there is earlier information also. One
reason why one feels proud of being born in Hampshire is that it is
all of such immemorial antiquity. The Norman Conquest there is just
nothing. Porchester and Winchester and Chichester are all a thousand
years older than that.

I fell into an error about my birthplace and put it into print a good
many times during the several years it lasted, so that I came near to
having the honour of a disputed birthplace, like Homer and Mr. Irvin
Cobb. It was Irvin Cobb, was it not, who said he had nearly got one
but couldn't keep the dispute going? Mine arose quite innocently. I
discovered that there is a Swanmore which is a suburb of Ryde in the
Isle of Wight, and as I know that my grandfather lived near Ryde, I
moved my birthplace into that suburb. Finding there was doubt, I wrote
to a solicitor at Ryde who had conducted the family business of the
Leacocks for generations and asked about it. He wrote that he thought
it extremely unlikely that I was born in such a locality as Swanmore,
Ryde. But I didn't know whether this was one on Swanmore or one on me,
whether Swanmore was not fit for me to be born in or whether I had not
the required class for Swanmore. So it stands at that. In any case it
was in 1869, and Swanmore may have picked up since.

But I was led by this to write to the Vicar of Bishop's Waltham, and
he sent me back a certificate of my birth and christening at Swanmore
Parish Church, and he said that not only was I born in Swanmore but
that Hampshire was proud of it. This gave me such a warm thrill of
affection for Hampshire that I very nearly renewed my subscription
(one guinea per annum) to the Hampshire Society: very nearly--not
quite. I knew they'd take the guinea, but I was not sure how they'd
feel about it. People who come from celebrated places like Hampshire,
known to all the world, and go away and don't see them again year
after year, are apt to get warm rushes of sudden affection and pride
towards the good old place. I've known people to feel this way towards
Texas or Newfoundland or in fact anywhere to which you can't get back.

In such a glow of feeling years ago I subscribed to the Hampshire
Society (one guinea per annum), and it was certainly a delight
at first to get the annual circular, with the names of the Lord
Lieutenant and a lot of people as fellow members, and the receipts and
disbursements, and the balance carried forward--excitements like
that. So it went on that way year after year for years--a guinea and a
guinea and a guinea--till one year all of a sudden I got an angry fit
of economy (in the depression) and asked, What am I getting out of all
this?--a guinea and a guinea--that could go on forever--and I wrote
and cut out my membership. It's nothing against Hampshire. People do
that to Texas and Newfoundland. And in any case it was in the same
year and about the same time that I cut out my subscriptions to the
Royal Society of Canada and the Authors' Association--even to things
that I didn't belong to. But it seemed a dirty trick to have dropped
the Hampshire Society and to have fallen out of the Receipts and
Disbursements and General Balance.

       *       *       *       *       *

My family were Hampshire people on both sides--not, of course, the
real thing, going back to the Conquest, but not bad. The Leacocks
lived on the Isle of Wight, where my grandfather had a house called
Oak Hill near Ryde, but I gather that he wanted the island for himself
and didn't want his sons to come crowding onto it. That's why they
were sent out across the world wherever it was farthest. The Leacocks
had made a lot of money out of plantations in Madeira and the Madeira
wine trade, so much that my great-grandfather John Leacock had retired
and bought the house at Oak Hill. After that nobody in the family did
any work (any real work) for three generations, after which, in my
generation, we were all broke and had to start work--and work in
the low-down sense, where you work by the hour, a thing that would
disqualify anybody in Hampshire right off the bat. My brothers, I
think, got seventeen cents an hour. I got a cent a minute, but that
was as a schoolteacher. But I am anticipating and I turn back.

The Leacocks, I say, were in Madeira wine and the wine trade, and some
of my cousins are still there and still in it. The senior member of
the family got out a few years ago a booklet about Madeira wines and
the Leacock family and he put into it the fatal sentence: "The first
recorded Leacock was a London day labourer, whose son was brought up
at a charity school and went out as a ship's cabin boy to Madeira!"
Think of it! What can you do after that? It's no use going on to say
what a wonderful fellow the ship's cabin boy was and how he built up
great plantations and ownerships. That's no good. You can't get over
that day-labourer stuff. The Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire knows just
where to class me.

My mother's family, the Butlers, were much better, though you couldn't
really call them Hampshire people as they had not, at the time of
which I speak, been in Hampshire for more than one hundred and fifty
years. They lived, and do still, in a house called Bury Lodge, which
is on a hill over-looking the immemorial village of Hambledon, Hants,
a village so old that they talk there of the Great Plague of 1666,
when so many people were buried in the churchyard, as an affliction
of yesterday. Hambledon, Hants, is to all people who play cricket and
love the game as Mecca is to a Mohammedan. Here, more than anywhere
else, began the sacred game--for there is no other adjective that can
convey what cricket means to Englishmen than the word "sacred." Here,
on the wind-swept open space of "Broadhalfpenny Down," was bowled the
first ball, the first rushing underhand ball where bowling began. Here
men in top hats planned and named the game, designated, by a flight of
daring fancy, the strip of ground between the wickets as the "pitch,"
indicated the right side of the batter as the "on" side and the
left as the "off" side--names taken from the English carriage
driving--christened the brave man fielding thirty feet behind the
batter's bat as "square leg" (he needed to be), invented the "over"
and the "wide" and the "no ball" and L.B.W.--to be carried round the
world later as the abiding bond of the British Empire.

The Butler family were intimately concerned with the beginnings of
cricket, and in the drawing room of Bury Lodge are preserved (on blue
foolscap paper, gummed onto the fire screens) some of the earliest
scores at Broadhalfpenny Down. When I was lecturing in London in 1921
I mentioned to E. V. Lucas, the famous humorist (also one of the
great authorities on cricket) this family connection and the old score
sheets at Bury Lodge. I found that he at once regarded me with a sort
of reverence. Nothing would do him but we must drive down to Hampshire
to look at them. This we did, Lucas supplying the car, while I felt
that my presence with him was compensation enough. The house was shut
up, as the Butlers were in London, but a housekeeper showed us the
scores, and then we drove up to Broadhalfpenny Down and stood there in
the wind--well, just as people stand on the ruins of Carthage. After
that we went down into Hambledon village and to the "pub," where I
had all that peculiar gratification that goes with "the return of the
native." There were several old men around, and it was astonishing
what they could remember over a pint of beer, and still more over a
quart. I had been away from Hambledon for nearly fifty years, so it
enabled one to play the part of Rip van Winkle. I didn't mention that
I had been there only once before, for ten minutes, as a child of six.

Generally the return of the native to his native town (for its old
home week or for what not) is apt to be spoiled by the fact that after
all he hasn't been away long enough, only ten or a dozen years at
most. So when he says, "What's become of the queer old cuss who used
to keep the drugstore? When did he die?" they answer in chorus, "He's
not dead. He's right there still." In such circumstances never say
that you'd give ten dollars to see so-and-so again, or they'll go and
bring him.

       *       *       *       *       *

As I say, my grandfather needed all the Isle of Wight to himself,
and so when my father married my mother, whose name was Agnes Butler,
daughter of the Reverend Stephen Butler, they were promptly sent out
to South Africa. That was in 1866-67, long before the days of diamonds
and gold created the South Africa of sorrows that came later. Those
were the days of sailing ships, of infinite distances and of long
farewells. They went "upcountry" to Maritzburg in oxcarts and then out
beyond it to settle. It was all as primitive then as we see it in
the movies that deal with Dr. Livingstone and darkest Africa. I
saw Maritzburg forty years later, when its people seemed a mass of
Asiatics, the immigrant wave from India that first awoke South Africa
to the "Asiatic peril."

       *       *       *       *       *

Maritzburg in 1867 no doubt appeared singularly quiet, but to those
who lived there the whole place, as my mother has told me, was
"seething with the Colenso controversy." I imagine few people of today
remember the name of Colenso, the Bishop of Natal, the mathematician
over whose _Arithmetic_ and _Algebra_ a generation of English
schoolboys groaned and whose mild aspersions on the Pentateuch--I
think it means the first five books of the Old Testament--opened
the way, like a water leak in a dam, to heresies that swept away the
literal interpretation of Scripture. Colenso became a sort of test
case, in orthodoxy, and in the law as to the government of the Church
of England in the colonies, and locally a test case in the fidelity of
the congregation. Some people in Natal would allow their children to
be baptised by the bishop and some wouldn't and held them over for the
dean any time the bishop was away. My eldest brother, who was born
in Natal, got caught up in this controversy and was torn backward and
forward before he could be christened. But the South African climate
proved impossible for my mother and the locusts ate up their farm, and
so the family came home again to Hampshire.

       *       *       *       *       *

My grandfather then took another big think as to where he would send
them to, and it was in this interregnum of thinking that my father was
supposed to be "learning farming" to fit him to be sent to America.
There was at that time in England a prevalent myth that farming could
be "learned," especially by young men who couldn't learn anything
else. So my father seems to have been moved round from one centre to
another, drinking beer under the tutelage of Hampshire farmers--who,
of course, could drink more than he could--an agreeable life in which
a young man was supposed to remain a gentleman even if he acted like
a farmer. As those of us who have been brought up on farms know,
you can't "learn farming," at least not that way. We could, in fact,
whisper to one another the way you learn it. First of all, as Course
No. 1, First Year Agronomics, you get onto a wagonload of manure at
six in the morning and drive up and down a seven-acre field throwing
it in all directions, in fact seeing how far you can throw it. Then
you go back for another load. Course No. 2, or Cultivation, involves
driving two horses hitched to what is called a set of field harrow up
and down a dry ploughed field so as to turn it into a cloud of dust
and thistledown. During the driving you shout _Gee_ and _Haw_ at the
horses. They don't know what it means, but they are used to hearing
it and they know where to go anyway. Courses like that, carried on
systematically over a period of years, make a man a farmer.

Of course I don't deny that over this and above it are the real
courses in agriculture such as they teach at Ste. Anne's, P.Q., out
near Montreal, and at the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph,
both splendid places. Here a student goes at it all scientifically,
learning the chemistry of the thing and the composition of soils and
all that. Hence when he goes back onto the farm he sees it all with
a new eye. He still spends his days driving the manure wagon round a
seven-acre field and driving harrows in a cloud of dust. But it is all
different. He now knows what manure _is_. Before that he thought it
was just manure. And he now understands why dust floats and he knows
what he is doing when he pulverizes the soil, instead of merely
thinking that he is "breaking it up good."

       *       *       *       *       *

During this period of interregnum my father and mother lived
at different places--Swanmore and Shoreham (in Sussex) and then
Porchester. Their large family (which ultimately reached eleven in
England and Canada) were born round in this way, only two in the
same place of the six born in England. It was from Porchester that my
father was sent out ahead of us by my grandfather to Kansas, a place
of which my grandfather must have heard great things in the early
seventies, though its first charm of the John Brown days was fading.

       *       *       *       *       *

Porchester is the only place of my childhood days in England that I
really remember. I lived there for two years (age four and a half to
six and a half), and in a sense it still means the England that is
England to me. At the opening of the present war, when the inspiring
song "There'll Always Be an England" burst upon the world, I set
forth this theme, as centred for me round Porchester in a magazine
publication, which I reproduce here.

  _THE ENGLAND I REMEMBER_

  _There'll Always Be an England_

I imagine that somebody first said that away back in Anglo-Saxon
times. The people who heard him say it most likely remarked, "Well,
naturally!" and, "Poetic chap, eh?"

Yet when I first heard those words sung they brought back to me a
sudden remembrance of the England of my childhood and a poignant
affection for it, more than I knew I had. This, I am sure, happened to
many people. . . .

  _ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND_

This, most certainly, is true of the immemorial village of Porchester
in which I was brought up, for which the flight of time was
meaningless. But my father's farm in South Africa, as I have said
before, was eaten out by locusts, and so he and my mother came home,
where I and other brothers were born. Meantime my grandfather was
consulting the map and picked on Kansas because at that time the
railways only got that far. My father went first, and we were placed
in Porchester so that we couldn't get to the Isle of Wight too often.
We were ready to go to America when word came that my father's farm in
Kansas had been eaten by grasshoppers (they are the same as locusts).
This meant delay while my grandfather looked for something farther
still. So we waited on in Porchester, and I had altogether six years
of an English childhood that I had no right to have under the rules.

Porchester? Where is it? Right across the water from Portsmouth. What
water? Ah, now, that I never knew--it's the water between Portsmouth
and Porchester. You can tell it by the tall masts and yards of the
men-of-war and of the _Victory_ swinging there at anchor. . . . Up
at the end of it was Paul's Grove, where St. Paul preached to the
ancient--ah, there you have me--but to a congregation probably very
like my uncle Charles's congregation in the little Porchester church.
. . . The church stood--or it did in 1876, and things can hardly have
changed in so short a time--inside the precincts of Porchester Castle.
You've seen the castle, perhaps--a vast quadrangle of towers and
battlements, and a great space inside for cattle during sieges. The
newer parts were built by the Normans but the original part by the
Romans. The Normans built the church, but Good Queen Anne "restored"
it, with a lot of others, and so, on the wall, there was a great
painted lettering in gilt and faded colours: BY THE BOUNTY OF QUEEN
ANNE. You could spell it out from your tall pew by the sunlight
falling on the wall through the dancing leaves, while Uncle Charles
preached, quietly so as not to wake the Normans, and the people gently
dozed.

  . . . _ALWAYS, AN ENGLAND_ . . .

Why, of course, to the people of Porchester. Time left no trace there;
all the centuries were yesterday, St. Paul, and the castle, and Queen
Elizabeth's bedroom, and Uncle Charles and Queen Anne.

  . . . _WHEREVER THERE'S A BUSY STREET_ . . .

Busy? Well, I suppose you would call it busy, the village street with
the little "common" breaking it in the middle. There was only one
of everything: one public house, one grocery, one rectory (Uncle
Charles's), one windmill (Pyecroft's), one fly (Peacock's), and so on.
There'd been no competition for years. The public house, the Crown and
Anchor, stood where it should, where the streets came together at the
"common," and looked as it should in _Father, Dear Father, Come Home
with Me Now_ . . . with red curtains in the windows.

  . . . _WHEREVER THERE ARE TURNING
                  WHEELS_ . . .

Pyecroft's mill looked just right, standing down on the water a little
way from the castle. The sails of Pyecroft's mill moved so slowly
they seemed to soar and hover. Tennyson speaks of a "tall mill that
whistled on the waste." He fell down there, eh, Pyecroft? Pyecroft
looked the part admirably, all dust . . . and Peacock who had the fly
matched it. All the people in Porchester looked like that; each fitted
the part . . . Old General Hurdle coming down the street, a frail,
old, soldierly figure, so upright that he quivered on his stick. Take
old Grubb, who had been in the Navy in the Great War (what we called
the Great War then); he sat catching periwinkles, or whatever they
caught, where the castle moat drained into the sea. He looked it
exactly, all tar. . . .

All the people, as I say, looked the part--the kind of things
despaired of by the movies. I never knew whether Gilbert and Sullivan
copied England or England copied Gilbert and Sullivan.

  . . . _A MILLION MARCHING FEET_ . . .

I am afraid that would be a large order for Porchester in 1876 . . .
a million--well, perhaps it seemed so to us children when swarms of
people used to come to the castle on holidays--I only half recall
them, Whitmonday, something Wednesday, Coronation Day--with Aunt
Sally's ginger beer and swings and drunken sailors.

  . . . _RED, WHITE, AND BLUE_ . . .

The blue, of course, was the sea. As for the "drunken sailors," why
indeed shouldn't they be drunk? They were "ashore," weren't they?
Those sailors were better drunk than sober . . . scattering pennies
and full of fun. Now a soldier was different . . . a low sort of
fellow, hanging around public houses and getting poor girls into
trouble . . . Why isn't he off in Ashantee or someplace like that
where soldiers belong?

  . . . _BRITONS, AWAKE_ . . .

Awake? Well, not too completely. I think of Uncle Charles preaching
decorously, quietly, the congregation nodding. I wouldn't disturb
that; it has been undisturbed too long. Uncle Charles--I have heard
him say it--was singularly fortunate. In Porchester there was no
outbreak of "religion." There was no chapel, no open-air preaching, no
vulgar confession of sin. No people got sudden "salvation"; they got
it gradually, through eighty years of drowsy Sundays. When I was
six it all came to an end. My grandfather found a place called Upper
Canada, clean out of reach of a railway. . . .

  . . . _WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU?_ . . .

Then came the most vivid memory, saying good-bye to England as a
child. . . . We went on board a great ship at Liverpool, a ship with
the towering masts and rigging of the grand old days . . . went on
board from a hole in the side, it seemed. It was all very wonderful
to us, though lots of people, like my mother, cried, because going to
America in 1876 meant good-bye.

But for us, the children, it was different; it was all wonderful . . .
the crew and all the passengers joined to haul up the anchor . . . And
they sang the song of the departing English, "Cheer, boys, cheer, no
more of idle sorrow," that echoed down the decades. As the words
died away on the ear--"Farewell, England, much as we have loved thee,
courage, true hearts, will bear us on our way!"--the great ship was
surging into the darkness under press of sail heading to what we call
"America."

  . . . _SHOUT IT LOUD: THE EMPIRE TOO_ . . .

It was all fun for us . . . the wind, the waves, the magnificence of
the "saloon" . . . And then the great sheets of ice until the ship
stopped. On Sunday the clergyman prayed to have it taken away and it
went.

Then came a morning when someone called down the companionway, "Come
and see America" . . . And there it was, a tall, hard coast of trees
and rock, clear and bright in the sunshine, not a bit soft, like
England.

  . . . _IF ENGLAND MEANS AS MUCH
              TO YOU_ . . .

It was the Gasp coast, and we were entering the St. Lawrence. I
understand that one of the members who represents this section in
a legislature proposes to break away from England the three million
people of English race and birth, to say nothing of the other three
million British, who live in Canada. It would be to blot out, for
some, the memories of childhood and, for all, the remembered talk of
parents and old people . . . tear up the books that hold the elegies
in country churchyards, and hush the sea songs of England on which Tom
Bowling's name floats to us down the wind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Speaking of Porchester, I may say that after I had gone down to
Hambledon with E. V. Lucas I was so fascinated with the role of
the returned native that I found time to make a hurried trip to
Porchester, to try it out again. When I got there I found my way from
the station up (or down; you never know which they call it in
England) the straggled street to the village common and to the
Father-Dear-Father-Come-Home-with-Me-Now public house of which I
spoke. I went into the Crown and Anchor and struck the proper attitude
over a glass of beer at the bar. "Nearly fifty years ago," I said
(feeling like the Silver King come home), "I used to live in this
village. Perhaps you can tell me something about the people I
remember."

The barmaid (she looked pretty ripe) threw her head indignantly in the
air. "No indeed, I couldn't," she said. "The idear!"

I saw that I was in wrong. "Not you yourself," I said. "You weren't
born and couldn't remember, but you may have heard of them from
your--grandparents."

"Well," she said, mollified, "Grandfather's in behind now. You might
come in and see him."

I went "in behind," and there was Grandfather looking just right,
as everything does in Porchester, just exactly the part, seated in a
chair, snow-white hair, a stick--age, say ninety.

"I thought perhaps," I said, "you could tell me something of the
people I remember here fifty years ago."

"Eh?" he shouted.

So I saw I'd have to speed things up.

"Could you tell me anything about my uncle, the Reverend Charles
Butler, who used to be the rector here fifty years ago?"

"The Reverend Charles Butler!" he shouted bitterly. "Indeed I could!
There was the meanest man that ever came to this village. He'd-a
stopped every poor man's beer, he would, if he'd had his way. Don't
talk to me of the Reverend Charles Butler."

I decided not to.

So I went out and I managed to find the house where we lived when I
was a child in Porchester. But what a poor, humble-looking place! I
had no idea that it could have been as poor as that! A little "hall"
just wide enough to squeeze through, a room on the left of it the size
of a box--the "drawing room," I called it at once from memory--and
another box behind it. I think my mother had the nerve to call it
the "breakfast room." I felt hurt and humiliated coming out. I hadn't
realized how used I had become to being well off, to living in comfort
and having everything. As I came out I saw that there were some men
there, evidently a builder and his "hands." They told me they were
going to knock down the house. I told them to go right ahead.

After that I had no heart to go on and see the castle. It might have
turned out to be just nothing as beside, say, the Royal York Hotel in
Toronto or the Chteau Frontenac in Quebec.

It is better not to go back to the place you came from. Leave your
memory as it is. No reality will ever equal it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was from my Hampshire childhood that I draw my interest in the
American frigate _Chesapeake_, of which noble old ship I have a
"chunk" on my library table.

Everyone recalls from his school history the immortal story of the
great fight between the American frigate _Chesapeake_ and the British
frigate _Shannon_ outside of Boston on June 1, 1813. It is not merely
the victory of the _Shannon_ that is remembered but the chivalrous
nature of the conflict, the ships meeting after a courteous challenge
from Captain Broke of the _Shannon_ to Captain Lawrence of the
_Chesapeake_. Broke generously offered to send any of his attendant
vessels out of range of helping him. The ships were an even
match--_Shannon_, 1,066 tons, broadside 544 pounds, crew 330; the
_Chesapeake_, 1,135 tons, broadside 570, crew (about) 400.

The result of the battle was a complete victory for the _Shannon_, but
with terrible loss on both sides. Lawrence was mortally wounded; Broke
so desperately wounded as never to fully recover, though he lived to
be an admiral and only died in 1841.

Now, I have always had a certain personal interest in the
_Chesapeake_. I have, as I say, on my library table a "chunk" of very
hard wood (teak or mahogany, I suppose), about eight inches by three
inches by two and a half inches, that was originally a piece of the
_Chesapeake_. I have had it for nearly seventy years, the kind of
thing you never lose if you pay no attention to it, like the fidelity
of an old friend.

When we were leaving England in 1876 to go to "America" we were taken
over to the Isle of Wight to see my grandfather, who was naturally
delighted--so much so that he gave me from the drawing-room table
at Oak Hill this bit of wood and said, "That was a piece of the
_Chesapeake_." Written on it in his writing, but now faded beyond
recognition, were the words, _A Piece of the American Frigate
"Chesapeake"--Captured 1813_.

I always wondered how my grandfather came to have a piece of the
_Chesapeake_, and this gave me an interest in the fate of the
vessel. But any printed account in the histories merely said that the
_Chesapeake_ was taken across the Atlantic to England--which is quite
true--and was commissioned in the service of the Royal Navy--which is
not so. But it has been only of late years, when I have been concerned
with writing Canadian history, that I have been able to get full
details of the fate of the old ship. I am indebted here very greatly
to the library staff of the Boston Public Library.

The amazing thing is that the _Chesapeake_ was taken over to England
and is still there--all the best timbers of the vessel, built in solid
as they came out of the ship, went into the making of a mill and are
still throbbing and quivering all day as the mill, one hundred and
twenty-three years old, still hums in an English village, grinding
corn.

The mill is at Wickham, and if you don't know where Wickham is, I may
say it's near Fareham--and Fareham?--well, close to Porchester--and
Porchester?--well, that's where I lived in England. Anyway, all these
places are in Hampshire, freely admitted to be (by all who live there)
the noblest of the English counties.

So there's the mill, and nobody knows about it. The reason is that
people who know all about the _Chesapeake_ know nothing of Wickham and
people who live in Wickham know nothing about the _Chesapeake_, though
of course they all know about the old mill. If you said, "That mill
was built out of the American ship _Chesapeake_, wasn't it?" they'd
say, "Aye, like as not!"--meaning that that would be just the kind of
thing to build a Hampshire mill out of.

Here is the story, though lack of space forbids full citation of
authorities.

After the battle of the first of June the _Chesapeake_ was sailed (or
partly towed) to Halifax Harbour--a voyage of five days. She entered
the harbour in the wake of the _Shannon_ on June 6, presenting a
terrible contrast of glory and tragedy, pride and honour--gay strings
of bright flags of victory flying above battered ports and broken
bulwarks, patched up as might be after the havoc of the broadsides.

Judge Haliburton, the famous writer still remembered for _Sam Slick_,
went on board. "The _Chesapeake_," he wrote, "was like a charnel house
. . . main deck filled with hammocks of the wounded, dead and dying
. . . the deck had of necessity (heavy weather?) not been cleaned . . .
steeped in gore as in a slaughterhouse." The body of Captain Lawrence,
who had died on board, lay on the quarter-deck under the Stars and
Stripes. He was buried, with many of his men, in Halifax.

The _Chesapeake_, refitted as might be, was sailed across to
Portsmouth. There history loses her with the false lead that the
Royal Navy recommissioned the ship. This is not so, nor can I find any
definite authority to say that she ever sailed again. She was bought
as she stood for five hundred pounds by a Mr. Holmes. He broke up
the vessel, sold several tons of copper from the sheeting with all
fittings and timber, and doubled his money. The main timbers
were pitch pine, new and sound, and some of them were sold for
housebuilding in Portsmouth but the best of them were bought by a
Mr. John Prior for two hundred pounds to build a mill. This he duly
erected (1820) in the hamlet of Wickham. The main timbers of the deck,
built into the structure intact, were (and are) thirty-two feet long
and eighteen inches square. The purloins were used, just as they were,
for joists.

With that the _Chesapeake_ was forgotten, and Wickham--it antedates
the Norman Conquest--fell asleep again.

Forty years later a descendant, or relation (I cannot trace him),
of Captain Broke of the _Shannon_ got interested in gathering
information. In a memoir which he wrote he quotes a letter from the
Vicar of Fareham, date of 1864, with the information given above and
the statement that the timbers of the _Chesapeake_ (in fact, the whole
mill) seemed "good for centuries yet."

They talk in centuries in Hampshire.

Then comes another sleep.

Then a Hampshire _Gazetteer and Guide_ of 1901 reports that the mill
at Wickham made of the timbers of the _Chesapeake_ is still intact and
in active operation.

Then followed another sleep of the topic till in 1943 I woke it again
by writing to the present Vicar of Fareham. I hadn't written sooner
because, although I knew the _Chesapeake_ was in a mill, I was looking
for the mill to be on the Isle of Wight.

So I wrote to the Vicar of Fareham, who referred me to Mr. George
Orwell of Fareham, who has done a lot of antiquarian work, especially
in things concerning the Navy, and whose writings under the name of
historian are well known to all people who love British antiquities
(very fine people).

Mr. Orwell wrote me to say that the mill is still (April 4, 1943)
quite as it was, timbers and all, going strong and likely to see a
long while yet.

What ought to be done about it? These timbers of the deck of the
_Chesapeake_--rebuilt into their earlier semblance--should have
something of the sacred memory of the deck of the _Victory_. Why not
buy them and give them to the United States? They should be a gift to
the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Those who know that place will recall
its trophies--the proudest part of the establishment. There swings
still afloat the schooner _America_ that won the cup in 1850
something, never recaptured; there is the old _Constitution_ and the
_Reina Mercedes_, and there in the great hall is Perry's flag with his
"_Don't give up the ship_," and much else.

The _Chesapeake_ would build into a fine platform, the old deck
reproduced, for Mr. Churchill to lecture from.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I look back on this mid-Victorian England into which I was born
and which first stamped itself on my mind, it gives me many things to
think about. How deeply set it was in the mould in which England was
cast and in which, to a great extent, it still remains. Side by
side with all that is splendid in history and in character is that
everlasting division that separates people from one another with the
heavy ridges and barriers of class distinction. Here are people born
to be poor, and how poor they were! I can remember that when we had
done with our tea leaves old women (the place seemed full of them)
would come and take them away to use over again. There were the poor
and there were the half poor, and there were the respectable people
and the genteel people, and the gentry and above them the great
people, all the way to the queen. And they all knew their places.

There was an elementary school called a national school, where the
children of the poor and of the respectable went at a fee of one penny
a week. I can see now that it must have been one of the schools set
up under the new Act, as it was then, of 1870, the first statute that
ever gave England general primary education. England had got afraid
that an illiterate population might mean danger to the nation. They
had had the object lesson of the armies of the Civil War in America.
The loud laughter of the London _Times_ and the haw! haw! of the
professional British officers had been exchanged for silent admiration
and deep respect when the same people realized what it means to have
an army of men every one of whom could read and write, of skilled
mechanics who could interpret a printed diagram, and private soldiers
with the technical knowledge to repair a damaged locomotive and reset
a dismantled telegraph line. It had become plain enough that England
had to do what one of its statesmen of the moment called "educate its
masters," if only for the masters' sake.

That was seventy-five years ago. And strangely enough the wheel has
turned a full circle and a similar discussion runs in the current
journals of 1944. All through the present controversy over the schools
and how to make the public schools public runs the note of anxiety,
Are we really finding all the brains of the nation? All, we need
them all! National brains are the first line of public safety for
everybody. There must be no gifted children left too poor for their
gifts to give service to the nation. Scholarships, endowments,
anything! We must have them.

It is a wonderful change. Compare it with the sentiment of Gray's
_Elegy_, in which the poet sorrows for the lack of opportunity that
kept people down to the level of the poor and buried them in a country
churchyard, but sorrows only for their own sakes.

  _Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
    Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
  Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
    Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre._

With Gray the sentiment is as of a wishful luxurious pity and has
nothing to do with any keen, anxious fear that the nation needs these
men and must not bury them unknown. His very phrases show it: "waking
the living lyre" is a thing that most of us could postpone for a
while.

       *       *       *       *       *

But, as I say, there was the national school functioning at a penny a
week for the poor and the respectable. But for the genteel, no, not
if they could reach a little higher, and of course not under any
circumstances for the gentry. So two older brothers and I--aged nine
and eight and six--went therefore to a dame's school, with which my
academic education began in 1875, not to be completed till 1903 with a
Chicago Ph.D. I recall but little of the dame school except the first
lesson in geography, in which the dame held up a map and we children
recited in chorus, "The top of the map is always the north, the bottom
south, the right hand east, the left hand west!" I wanted to speak out
and say, "But it's only that way because you're holding it that way,"
but I was afraid to. Cracks with a ruler were as easy to get in a
dame's school as scratches down on the Rio Grande.

So, as I say, it was an England all of class and caste, with everybody
doing his duty in the state of life into which it had pleased God to
call him. But of this later.




LIFE ON THE OLD FARM


I enjoy the distinction, until very recently a sort of recognized
title of nobility in Canada and the United States, of having
been "raised on the old farm." Till recently, I say, this was the
acknowledged path towards future greatness, the only way to begin.
The biographies of virtually all our great men for three or four
generations show them as coming from the farm. The location of the
"old home farm" was anywhere from Nova Scotia to out beyond Iowa, but
in its essence and idea it was always the same place. I once described
it in a book of verse which I wrote as a farewell to economics, which
was so clever that no one could read it and which I may therefore
quote with novelty now.

  _The Homestead Farm, way back upon the Wabash,
                           Or on the Yockikenny,
    Or somewhere up near Albany--the Charm
      Was not confined to one, for there were many.
  There when the earliest Streak of Sunrise ran,
  The Farmer dragged the Horses from their Dream
  With "Get up, Daisy" and "Gol darn yer, Fan,"
  Had scarcely snapped the Tugs and Britching than
  The furious Hayrack roared behind the team.
      All day the Hay
      Was drawn that way
      Hurled in the Mow
      Up high--and how!
  Till when the ending Twilight came, the loaded Wain
  With its last, greatest Load turned Home again.
      The Picture of it rises to his Eye
      Sitting beside his Father, near the Sky._

I admit that within the last generation or so, in softer times of
multiplying luxury, men of eminence have been raised in a sickly
sort of way in the cities themselves, have got their strength from
high-school athletics, instead of at the woodpile and behind the
harrows, and their mental culture by reading a hundred books once
instead of one book a hundred times. But I am talking of an earlier
day.

It was a condition, of course, that one must be raised on the old farm
and then succeed in getting off it. Those who stayed on it turned into
rustics, into "hicks" and "rubes," into those upstate characters which
are the delight of the comic stage. You had your choice! Stay there
and turn into a hick; get out and be a great man. But the strange
thing is that they all come back. They leave the old farm as boys so
gladly, so happy to get away from its dull routine, its meaningless
sunrise and sunset, its empty fresh winds over its fields, the silence
of the bush--to get away into the clatter and effort of life, into the
crowd. Then, as the years go by, they come to realize that at a
city desk and in a city apartment they never see the sunrise and the
sunset, have forgotten what the sky looks like at night and where the
Great Dipper is, and find nothing on the angry gusts of wind or the
stifling heat of the city streets that corresponds to the wind over
the empty fields . . . so they go back, or they think they do, back
to the old farm. Only they rebuild it, but not with an ax but with
an architect. They make it a great country mansion with flagstoned
piazzas and festooned pergolas--and it isn't the old farm any more.
You can't have it both ways.

       *       *       *       *       *

But as I say, I had my qualifying share, six years of the old
farm--after I came out as a child of six from England--in an isolation
which in these days of radio and transport is unknown upon the globe.

As explained in the first chapter, I was brought out by my mother
from England to Canada as the third of her six children in 1876 on the
steamship _Sarmatian_, Liverpool to Montreal, to join my father who
had gone ahead and taken up a farm. The _Sarmatian_ was one, was
practically the last one, of those grand old vessels of the Allan Line
which combined steam with the towering masts, the cloud of canvas, the
maze of ropes and rigging of a full-rigged three-masted ship. She was
in her day a queen of the ocean, that last word which always runs on
to another sentence. She had been built in 1871, had had the honour of
serving the queen as a troopship for the Ashanti war and the further
honour of carrying the queen's daughter to Canada as the wife of
the Marquis of Lorne, the governor general. No wonder that in my
recollection of her the _Sarmatian_ seemed grand beyond belief and
carried a wealth of memories of the voyage of which I have already
spoken. For years I used to feel as if I would "give anything" to see
the _Sarmatian_ again. "Give anything" at that stage of my finance
meant, say, anything up to five dollars--anyway, a whole lot. And
then it happened years and years after, when I had gone to Montreal
to teach at McGill (it was in 1902), that I saw in the papers that
the _Sarmatian_ was in port; in fact I found that she still came in
regularly all season and would be back again before navigation closed.
So I never saw her. I meant to but I never did. When I read a little
later that the old ship had been broken up I felt that I would have
"given anything" (ten dollars then) to have seen her.

       *       *       *       *       *

In those days most people still came up, as we did in 1876, by river
steamer from Montreal to Toronto. At Kingston we saw the place all
decked with flags and were told that it was the "Twenty-fourth of
May." We asked what that meant, because in those days they didn't keep
"Queen's Birthday" as a holiday in England. They kept Coronation Day
with a great ringing of bells, but whether there was any more holiday
to it than bell ringing I don't remember. But, as we were presently
to learn, the "Twenty-fourth" was at that time the great Upper Canada
summer holiday of the year; Dominion Day was still too new to have got
set. There wasn't any Labour Day or any Civic Holiday.

       *       *       *       *       *

From Toronto we took a train north to Newmarket; a funny train, it
seemed to us, all open and quite unlike the little English carriages,
cut into compartments that set the fields spinning round when you
looked out of the window. Newmarket in 1876 was a well-established
country town--in fact, as they said, "quite a place." It still is. It
was at that time the place from which people went by the country roads
to the south side of Lake Simcoe, the township of Georgina, to which
at that time there was no railway connection. From Newmarket my father
and his hired man were to drive us the remaining thirty miles to reach
the old farm. They had for it two wagons, a lumber wagon and a "light"
wagon. A light wagon was lighter than a lumber wagon, but that's all
you could say about it--it is like those histories which professors
call "short" histories. They might have been longer. So away we went
along the zigzag roads, sometimes along a good stretch that would
allow the horses to break into a heavy attempt at a trot, at other
times ploughing through sand, tugging uphill, or hauling over corduroy
roads of logs through thick swamps where the willow and alder bushes
almost met overhead and where there was "no room to pass." On the lift
of the hills we could see about us a fine rolling country, all woods,
broken with farms, and here and there in the distance on the north
horizon great flecks of water that were Lake Simcoe. And so on, at a
pace of four or five miles an hour, till as the day closed in we went
over a tumbled bridge with a roaring milldam and beyond it a village,
the village of Sutton--two mills, two churches, and quite a main
street, with three taverns. My father told us that this was our own
village, a gift very lightly received by us children after memories of
Porchester and Liverpool and the _Sarmatian_. My mother told me years
afterwards that to her it was a heartbreak. Beyond the village, my
father told us, we were on our home road--another dubious gift, for it
was as heavy as ever, with a great cedar swamp a mile through in the
centre, all corduroy and willows and marsh and water; beyond that up
a great hill with more farmhouses, and so across some fields, to a
wind-swept hill space with a jumble of frame buildings and log barns
and outhouses, and there we were at the old farm, on a six-year
unbroken sentence.

       *       *       *       *       *

The country round our farm was new in the sense that forty years
before it was unbroken wilderness and old in the sense that farm
settlers, when they began to come, had come in quickly. Surveyors
had marked out roads. The part of the bush that was easy to clear was
cleared off in one generation, log houses built, and one or two frame
ones, so that in the sense the country in its outline was just as it
is now: only at that time it was more bush than farms, now more farms
than the shrunken remnant of bush. And of course in 1876 a lot of old
primeval trees, towering hemlocks and birch, were still standing. The
last of the great bush fires that burned them out was in the summer
when we came, the bush all burning, the big trees falling in masses of
spark and flame, the sky all bright, and the people gathered from all
round to beat out the shower of sparks that fell in the stubble fields . . .

       *       *       *       *       *

This country around Lake Simcoe (we were four miles to the south of it
and out of the sight of it), beautiful and fertile as it is, had never
been settled in the old colonial days. The French set up missions
there among the Hurons (northwest of the lake), but they were wiped
out in the great Iroquois massacre of 1649 in the martyrdom of the
Fathers Lalemant and Brbeuf. The tourist of today sees from his
flying car the road signs of "Martyr's Shrine" intermingled with the
"Hot Dogs" and "Joe's Garage." After the massacre the French never
came back. The Iroquois danger kept the country empty, as it did all
western Ontario. Nor did the United Empire Loyalists come here. They
settled along the St. Lawrence and the Bay of Quinte and Niagara and
Lake Erie, but the Lake Simcoe country remained till that century
closed as empty as it is beautiful.

Settlement came after the "Great War" ended with Waterloo and
world peace, and a flock of British emigrants went out to the newer
countries. Among them were many disbanded soldiers and sailors and
officers with generous grants of land. These were what were called in
England "good" people, meaning people of the "better" class but
not good enough to stay at home, which takes money. With them came
adherents and servants and immigrants at large, but all good people
in the decent sense of the word, as were all the people round our old
farm no matter how poor they were. The entry of these people to the
Lake Simcoe country was made possible by Governor Simcoe's opening of
Yonge Street, north from Toronto to the Holland River. It was at
first just a horse track through the bush, presently a rough roadway
connecting Toronto (York) with the Holland River, and then, by cutting
the corner of Lake Simcoe with the Georgian Bay and thus westward to
the Upper Lakes, a line of communication safe from American invasion.
It was part of Governor Simcoe's preoccupation over the defense of
Upper Canada, which bore such good fruit in its unforeseen results of
new settlement.

So the settlers, once over the waters of Lake Simcoe, found their way
along its shore, picked out the likely places, the fine high ground,
the points overlooking the lake. Here within a generation arose
comfortable lake-shore homes, built by people with a certain amount of
money, aided by people with no money but glad to work for wages for
a time, till they could do better. From the first the settlement was
cast in an aristocratic mould such as had been Governor Simcoe's dream
for all his infant colony. Simcoe was long since gone by this time. He
left Canada in 1796 and died in England in 1806. But the mark that
he set on Upper Canada wore faint only with time and is not yet
obliterated. Simcoe planned a constitution and a colony to be an
"image and transcript" of England itself. An established church and
an aristocracy must be the basis of it. To Simcoe a democrat was a
dangerous Jacobin and a dissenter a snivelling hypocrite. He despised
people who would sit down to eat with their own servants, as even
"good" people began to do in Upper Canada; "Fellows of one table," he
called them, and he wanted nothing to do with them in his government.
Others shared his views, and hence that queer touch of make-believe,
or real aristocracy, that was then characteristic of Simcoe's York
(Toronto) and that helped to foster the Canadian rebellion of 1837.

       *       *       *       *       *

So after the first "aristocracy" houses were built on the lake shore
of Georgina Township settlers began to move up to the higher ground
behind it, better land and cheaper. For the lake, for being on the
water, most of them cared nothing. They wanted to get away from it.
The lake shore was cold. It is strange to think that now you can buy
all of that farmland you want at about thirty or forty dollars an
acre, but an acre down at the lake shore is worth, say, a couple of
thousand, and you can't get it anyway.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our own farm with its buildings was, I will say, the damnedest place
I ever saw. The site was all right, for the slow slope of the hillside
west and south gave a view over miles of country and a view of the
sunset only appreciated when lost. But the house! Someone had built
a cedar log house and then covered it round with clapboard, and then
someone else had added three rooms stuck along the front with more
clapboard, effectually keeping all the sunlight out. Even towards the
sunset there were no windows, only the half glass top of a side door.
A cookhouse and a woodshed were stuck on behind. Across a grass yard
were the stable, cedar logs plastered up, and the barns, cedar logs
loose and open, and a cart shed and a henhouse, and pigsties and all
that goes with a farm. To me as a child the farm part seemed just one
big stink. It does still: the phew! of the stable--not so bad as the
rest; the unspeakable cowshed, sunk in the dark below a barn, beyond
all question of light or ventilation, like a medival oubliette; the
henhouse, never cleaned and looking like a guano-deposit island off
the coast of Chile, in which the hens lived if they could and froze
dead if they couldn't; the pigsties, on the simple Upper Canada
fashion of a log pen and a shelter behind, about three feet high.
Guano had nothing on them.

We presently completed our farmhouse to match the growing family by
adding a new section on the far side of it, built of frame lumber
only, with lath and plaster and no logs, thin as cardboard and cold as
a refrigerator. Everything froze when the thermometer did. We took for
granted that the water would freeze in the pitchers every night and
the windowpanes cover up with frost, not that the old farm was not
heated. It had had originally a big stone fireplace in the original
log house, but as with all the fireplaces built of stone out of the
fields without firebrick, as the mortar began to dry out the fireplace
would set the house on fire. That meant getting up on the roof (it
wasn't far) with buckets of water and putting it out. My father and
the hired man got so tired putting out the house on fire that we
stopped using the fireplace and had only stoves, box stoves that
burned hemlock, red hot in ten minutes with the dampers open. You
could be as warm as you liked, according to distance, but the place
was never the same two hours running. There were, I think, nine stoves
in all; cutting wood was endless. I quote again from my forgotten
book.

  _Winter stopped not the Work; it never could.
  Behold the Furious Farmer splitting Wood.
  The groaning Hemlock creaks at every Blow
  "Hit her again, Dad, she's just got to go."
                            And up he picks
                            The Hemlock sticks
                            Out of the snow._

For light we had three or four coal-oil lamps, but being just from
England, where they were unknown, we were afraid of them. We used
candles made on the farm from tallow poured into a mould, guttering
damn things, to be snuffed all the time and apt to droop over in the
middle. It is hardly credible to me now, but I know it is a fact that
when my brother and I sat round a table doing our lessons or drawing
and painting pictures, all the light we had was one tallow candle in
the middle of the table. It should have ruined our eyesight, but it
didn't. I don't think any of us under fifty wore spectacles; just as
the ill-cooked food of the farm, the heavy doughy bread, the awful
pork and pickles should have ruined our digestions but couldn't. Boys
on the farm who go after the cattle at six in the morning are in the
class of the iron dogs beside a city step.

       *       *       *       *       *

My father's farm--one hundred acres, the standard pattern--was based
on what is called mixed farming--that is, wheat and other grains,
hay, pasture, cattle, a few sheep and pigs and hens, roots for winter,
garden for summer and wood to cut in the bush. The only thing to sell
was wheat, the false hope of the Ontario farmer of the seventies,
always lower in the yield than what one calculated (if you calculated
low it went lower) and always (except once in a happy year) lower than
what it had to be to make it pay. The other odd grains we had to
sell brought nothing much, nor the cattle, poor lean things of the
prebreeding days that survived their awful cowshed. My father knew
nothing about farming, and the hired man, "Old Tommy," a Yorkshireman
who had tried a bush farm of his own and failed, still less. My father
alternated furious industry with idleness and drinking, and in spite
of my mother having a small income of her own from England, the farm
drifted onto the rocks and the family into debt. Presently there was a
mortgage, the interest on which being like a chain around my father's
neck, and later on mine. Indeed, these years of the late 1870s were
the hard times of Ontario farming, with mortgages falling due like
snowflakes.

Farming in Ontario, in any case, was then and still is an alternating
series of mortgages and prosperity following on like the waves of the
sea. Anyone of my experience could drive you through the present farm
country and show you (except that it would bore you to sleep) the mark
of the successive waves like geological strata. Here on our right is
the remains of what was the original log house of a settler: you can
tell it from the remains of a barn, because if you look close you
can see that it had a top story, or part of one, like the loft where
Abraham Lincoln slept. You will see, too, a section of its outline
that was once a window. Elsewhere, perhaps on the same farm, but still
standing, is an old frame house that was built by mortgaging the log
house. This one may perhaps be boarded up and out of use because it
was discarded when wheat went to two dollars and fifty cents a bushel
in the Crimean War and the farmer, suddenly enriched, was able to add
another mortgage and built a brick house--those real brick houses that
give the motorist the impression that all farmers are rich. So they
were--during the Crimean War. Later on, and reflecting the boom
years of the closing nineties and the opening century, are the tall
hip-roofed barns with stone and cement basements below for cattle
and silos at the side, which give the impression that all farmers are
scientists--only they aren't; it's just more mortgages.

Such has been the background of Ontario farming for one hundred years.

Our routine on the farm, as children, was to stay on it. We were too
little to wander, and even the nearest neighbours were half a mile
away. So we went nowhere except now and then, as a treat, into Sutton
village, and on Sunday to the church on the lake shore. Practically,
except for school, we stayed at home all the time--years and years.

There was, a mile away, a school (School Section No. 3, Township of
Georgina) of the familiar type of the "little red schoolhouse" that
has helped to make America. It was a plain frame building, decently
lighted, with a yard and a pump and a woodpile, in fact all the
accessories that went with the academic life of School Section No. 3.
The boys and girls who went there were the children of decent people
(there were no others in the township), poor, but not exactly aware of
it. In summer the boys went barefoot. We didn't--a question of caste
and thistles. You have to begin it at three years old to get the feel
for it.

There were two teachers, a man teacher and a lady teacher, and it was
all plain and decent and respectable, and the education first class,
away ahead of the dame-school stuff in England. All of the education
was right to the point--reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic,
geography--with no fancy, silly subjects such as disfigure our present
education even at its beginning and run riot in the college at the
top. Things about the school that were unsanitary were things then so
customary that even we children from England found nothing wrong. We
spit on our slates to clean them with the side of our hand. We all
drank out of the same tin mug in the schoolyard. The boys and girls
were together in classes, never outside.

The only weak spot in the system of the little red schoolhouse was
that the teachers were not permanent, not men engaged in teaching
making it their lifework, like the Scottish "dominie" who set his
mark upon Scotland. You can never have a proper system of national
education without teachers who make teaching their lifework, take a
pride in it as a chosen profession, and are so circumstanced as to
be as good as anybody--I mean as anything around. In the lack of this
lies the great fault in our Canadian secondary education, all the way
up to college.

So it was with the country schools of 1876. The teachers were young
men who came and went, themselves engaged in the long stern struggle
of putting themselves through college, for which their teaching was
only a steppingstone. An arduous struggle it was. A schoolteacher
(they were practically all men; the girl teachers were just appendages
to the picture) got a salary of three hundred dollars to four hundred
dollars a year. Call it four hundred dollars. During his ten months
a year of teaching he paid ten dollars a month for his board and
washing. I don't suppose that his clothes cost him more than fifty
dollars a year, and all his other extras of every kind certainly not
more than another fifty. For in those days, after necessaries were
paid for, there was nothing to spend money on. The teacher never
drank. Not that he didn't want to, but every drink cost money, five
cents, and he hadn't got it. If a teacher did begin to drink and did
start to loaf around the taverns, it undermined the sternness of his
life's purpose as a slow leak undermines a dam. It became easier to
drink than to save money; he felt rich instead of poor, and presently,
as the years went by, he drank himself out of this purpose altogether,
quit schoolteaching, went north--to the lumber shanties or worked in
a sawmill--living life downhill, marked out still, by the wreck of
his education, as a man who had once been a teacher and still quoted
poetry when he was tight.

But most, practically all, stuck right at it, saving, say, two hundred
dollars a year towards college. And this is what college cost, college
being the University of Toronto. The fees were forty dollars a year
(say sixty dollars in medicine), and board and lodging in the mean
drab houses of the side streets where the poorer students lived cost
three dollars a week, and washing, I think, twenty-five cents a week.
They washed anything then for five cents, even a full-dress shirt,
and anyway the student hadn't got a full-dress shirt. College books
in those days cost about ten dollars a year. There were no college
activities that cost money, nothing to join that wanted five dollars
for joining it, no cafeterias to spend money in, since a student ate
three times a day at his boardinghouse and that was the end of it.
There was no money to be spent on college girls, because at that time
there were no college girls to spend money on. Homer says that the
beauty of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships (meaning made that
much trouble). The attraction of the college girl was to launch about
a thousand dollars--added to college expenses.

But all that was far, far away in 1876, and a student's college budget
for the eight months of the session, including his clothes and his
travel expenses and such extras as even the humblest and sternest must
incur, would work out at about three hundred dollars for each college
year. That meant that what he could save in a year and a half of
teaching would give him one year at college. Added to this was the
fact that in the vacation--the two months of a teacher's vacation or
the four months for a college vacation--he could work on a farm for
his board and twenty dollars a month and save almost the whole of the
twenty dollars. I have known at least one teacher, later on a leader
of the medical profession of Alberta, who put in seven years of this
life of teaching to get his college course. But in most cases there
would be some extra source of supply: an uncle who owned a sawmill
and could lend two or three hundred dollars, or an uncle over in the
States, or an older brother who came down from the "shanties" in the
spring with more money than he knew what to do with. For what could he
do with it, except drink or go to college?

So in the end adversity was conquered, and the teachers passed through
college and into law or medicine, with perhaps politics and public
life, and added one more name to the roll of honour of men who "began
as teachers." Some failed on the last lap, graduated, and then got
married, tired of waiting for life to begin, and thus sank back again
on teaching--as a high-school teacher, a better lot but still not good
enough.

But the system was, and is, all wrong. Our teacher, with his thirty
dollars a month, didn't get as much as our Old Tommy, the hired man,
for he and his wife had twenty dollars a month and a cottage with it
and a garden, milk and eggs and vegetables and meat to the extent
of his end (I forget which) of any pig that was killed. A teacher
situated like that could be a married man, as snug and respected as a
Scottish dominie with his cottage and his kailyard, his trout rod
and his half dozen Latin books bound in vellum--"as good as anybody,"
which is one of the things that a man has got to be in life if he is
to live at all. The teachers weren't. I never was, and never felt I
was, in the ten years I was a teacher. That is why later on I spent so
many words in decrying schoolteaching as a profession, not seeing that
schoolteaching is all right for those who are all right for it. The
thing wrong is the setting we fail to give it.

Such was our school at School Section No. 3, Township of Georgina,
County of York. It had also its amenities as well as its work. Now
and again there were school "entertainments." I can't remember if the
people paid to come. I rather think not, because in that case they
wouldn't come. For an entertainment the school was lit with extra
lamps. The teacher was chairman. The trustees made speeches or shook
their heads and didn't. The trustees were among the old people who had
come out from the "old country" with some part of another environment,
something of an older world, still clinging to them. Some, especially
Scotsmen like old Archie Riddell, would rise to the occasion and make
a speech with quite a ring and a thrill to it, all about Marmion and
Bruce and footprints on the sands of time. Then the teachers would say
that we'd hear from Mr. Brown, and Mr. Brown, sitting in a sunken lump
in a half-light, would be seen to shake his head, to assure us that we
wouldn't. After which came violin music by local fiddlers, announced
grandiloquently by the chairman as "Messrs. Park and Ego," although we
knew that really they were just Henry Park and Angus Ego. Perhaps
also some lawyer or such person from the village four miles away would
drive up for the entertainment and give a reading or a recitation. It
was under those circumstances that I first heard W. S. Gilbert's _Yarn
of the "Nancy Bell_." It seemed to me wonderful beyond words, and the
Sutton lawyer, a man out of wonderland.

       *       *       *       *       *

But going to the country school just didn't work out. It was too far
for us, and in rough weather and storm impossible, and it was out of
the question for a younger section of the family (the ones in between
the baby and ex-baby and the "big boys"). Moreover, my mother was
haunted with the idea that if we kept on at the school we might
sideslip and cease to be gentlemen. Already we were losing our
Hampshire accent, as heard in _Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star_--not
"stah," and not "star," but something in between. I can still catch it
if I am dead tired or delirious. We were beginning also to say "them
there" and "these here," and "who all" and "most always," in short,
phrases that no one can use and grow up a gentleman.

So my mother decided that she would teach us herself and with
characteristic courage set herself at it, in the midst of all her
other work with the baby and the little children and the kitchen and
the servants and the house. Servants, of course, we always had: at
least one maid--I beg pardon, I'm losing my language--I mean one
"hired girl" and a "little girl" and generally an "old woman." Top
wages were eight dollars a month; a little girl got five dollars.
There was a certain queer gentility to it all. The hired men never sat
down to eat with us, nor did the hired girl. Her status, in fact, as
I see it in retrospect, was as low and humble as even an English earl
could wish it. She just didn't count.

       *       *       *       *       *

My mother had had in England a fine education of the Victorian
finishing-school type and added to it a love and appreciation of
literature that never left her all her life, not even at ninety years
of age. So she got out a set of her old English schoolbooks that
had come with us in a box from England--Colenso's _Arithmetic_, and
Slater's _Chronology_, and Peter Parley's _Greece and Rome_, and
Oldendorf's _New Method of French_--and gathered us around her each
morning for school, opened with prayers, and needing them. But it was
no good; we wouldn't pay attention, we knew it was only Mother. The
books didn't work either--most of them were those English manuals
of history and such, specially designed for ladies' schools and for
ladies who had to teach their own children out in the "colonies." They
were designed to get a maximum of effect for a minimum of effort, and
hence they consisted mostly of questions and answers, the questions
being what lawyers call leading questions, ones that suggest their own
answers. Thus they reduced Roman history to something like this:

Q. Did not Julius Caesar invade Britain?

A. He did.

Q. Was it not in the year 55 B.C.?

A. It was.

Q. Was he not later on assassinated in Rome?

A. He was.

Q. Did not his friend Brutus take a part in assassinating him?

A. He did.

In this way one could take a birdlike flight over ancient history. I
think we hit up about two hundred years every morning, and for ancient
Egypt over one thousand years. I had such a phenomenal memory that it
was all right for me, as I remembered the question and answer both.
But my elder brothers Dick and Jim were of heavier academic clay, and
so they just--as the politicians say--took it as read.

The _Arithmetic_ of Bishop Colenso of Natal was heavier going. After
multiplication and division it ran slap-bang into the Rule of Three,
and Mother herself had never understood what the Rule of Three was,
and if you went on beyond it all you found was Practice and Aliquot
Parts. I know now that all this is rule-of-thumb arithmetic, meant
for people who can't reason it out, and brought straight down from the
Middle Ages to Colenso. The glory of the unitary method, whereby if
one man needs ten cigarettes a day then two men need twenty, and so
on for as many men and as many cigarettes and as long a time as
you like--this had not dawned on the British mind. I think it was
presently imported from America.

       *       *       *       *       *

So my mother's unhappy lessons broke down, and we were just about to
be sent back to the red schoolhouse when by good luck we managed to
secure a family tutor, from whom we received, for the next three or
four years, teaching better than I have ever had since and better than
any I ever gave in ten years as a schoolteacher. Our tutor was a young
man off a near-by farm, stranded halfway through college by not
having taught long enough and compelled to go back to teaching. So my
grandfather from England put up the money (for fear, of course, that
we might come back home on him), and there we were with a tutor and
a schoolroom, inkwells, scribblers, slates--in fact, a whole academic
outfit. Our tutor was known as "Harry Park" to his farm associates,
but to us, at once and always, as "Mr. Park," and he ranked with
Aristotle in dignity and width of learning. Never have I known anyone
who better dignified his office, made more of it, so that our little
schoolroom was as formal as Plato in his Academy could have wished it.
Mr. Park rechristened my brother Jim as "James," to give him class,
and Dick reappeared as "Arthur." The hours were as regular as the
clock itself, in fact more so, since Mr. Park's watch soon took
precedence over the kitchen clock, as the "classes" (made up of us
four boys and my little sister, just qualified) were as neatly divided
as in a normal school. I had to be Class I, but my brothers didn't
care, as they freely admitted that I was the "cleverest"--they looked
on it as no great asset. For certain purposes, poetry and history, we
were all together.

For us "Mr. Park" knew everything, and I rather think that he thought
this himself. Ask him anything and we got the answer. "Mr. Park,
what were the Egyptians like?" He knew it and he told it, in measured
formal language.

Under "Mr. Park's" teaching my brothers at least learned all that
could be put into them, and I personally went forward like an arrow.
At eleven years of age I could spell practically anything, knew all
there was to know of simple grammar (syntax, parsing, analysis),
beyond which there is nothing worth while anyway, knew Collier's
_British History_ and _History of English Literature_, all the
geography of all the countries including Canada (the provinces of
Canada which had not been in Mother's book), and in arithmetic had
grasped the unitary system and all that goes with it and learned how
to juggle with vulgar fractions even when piled up like a Chinese
pagoda, and with decimals let them repeat as they would.

After Mr. Park came to us as tutor and the little red schoolhouse of
School Section No. 3, Township of Georgina, was cut out, our isolation
was all the more complete. We practically stayed on the farm. But of
course a part of the old farm, to children of eight to twelve years
old, newly out from England, was a land of adventure; all the main
part of it, as it sloped away to the south and west, was clear fields
of the seven-acre pattern with snake fences all round it, piles
of stones that had been cleared off the fields lying in the fence
corners, raspberry bushes choking up the corners, but here and there
an old elm tree springing up in an angle of the fence as a survival of
the cleared forests. Elm trees have the peculiarity that they can do
well alone, as no storm can break them, whereas hemlocks isolated by
themselves are doomed. Hence the odd elm trees scattered all through
this part of central Ontario, as if someone had set them on purpose to
serve as shade trees or landscape decoration. Heaven knows no one did.
For the earlier settlers' trees, to a great extent, were the enemy.
The Upper Canada forest was slaughtered by the lumber companies
without regard for the future, which in any case they could neither
foresee nor control. In the early days the export of lumber was only
in the form of square timber--great sticks of wood from twelve to
eighteen inches each way, not cut up into the boards and deals and
staves of the later lumber trade. Hence the trees were squared as they
fell in the falling forest, and about one third of the main tree and
all its branches burned up as litter to get rid of it. That was the
early settlers' idea of the bush: get rid of it where he could, and
where it lay too low, too sunken, too marshy, to clear it. Then cut
out the big trees and haul them out, leave the rest of the bushes
there, and let farm clearings and roads get round it as best they
could. As to planting any new trees to conserve the old ones, the
farmers would have thought it a madman's dream. The only trees planted
were the straight, fast-growing Lombardy poplars, still seen in their
old age, set out in single or in little rows in front of the early
Ontario houses. These owe their origin to the legend or the fact that
they act as lightning conductors, a part of Benjamin Franklin's legacy
to North America, along with the box stove and much else.

I am saying then that our old farm at its north end fell slap away
down a steep hillside at the foot of which began the bush that spread
off sideways in both directions as far as one could see, and directly
in front it rose again in a slope that blotted out all view of Lake
Simcoe four miles away. Along the fringes of it were still some of the
giant hemlocks that had escaped the full fury of the last bush fire,
dead, charred, and still standing, but falling one by one. The
bush, as one tried to penetrate it, grew denser and denser, mostly
underbrush with tangled roots and second growth sprung up after
the fires. It was so dense that for us it was impenetrable, and we
ventured our way farther and farther in, carrying hatchets and alert
for wildcats, which I am practically certain were not there, and for
bears, which had left years and years ago.

We had hardly any social life, as we were prevented, partly by "class"
and mainly by distance, from going over to the other farms after dark.
To one farm where lived a family of English children of something the
same mixed antecedents as ourselves we sometimes went over for tea,
and at times all the way to the village or to the lake-shore houses.
But such treks meant staying overnight.

So mostly we stayed at home, and in the evenings we did our lessons,
if we had lessons to do, and my mother read to us Walter Scott and
carried us away to so deep an impression of the tournaments and
battlefields of the Crusade and of the warring forests of Norman-Saxon
England that any later "moving picture" of such things is but a mere
blur of the surface. We cannot have it both ways. Intensity of mental
impression and frequency of mental impression cannot go together.
Robinson Crusoe's discovery of Friday's footprints on the sand--read
aloud thus by candlelight to wondering children--has a dramatic
"horror" to it (horror means making one's hair stand up) that no
modern cinema or stage can emulate. Similarly I recall the reading
aloud of _Tom Sawyer_, then of course, still a new book, and the
dramatic intensity of the disclosure that Indian Joe is sealed up in
the great cave.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our news from the outside world came solely in the form of the
_Illustrated London News_ sent out by my grandmother from England. In
it we saw the pictures of the Zulu War and the (second) Afghan War and
of Majuba Hill. With it we kept alive the British tradition that all
Victorian children were brought up in, never doubting that of course
the Zulus were wrong and the Afghans mistaken and the Boers entirely
at fault. This especially, as Mother had lived in South Africa and
said so.

On one point, however, of British Victorian orthodox faith I
sideslipped at eight years old and have never entirely got back, and
that too the greatest point in all British history. I refer to the
question of George Washington and George the Third and whether the
Americans had the right to set up a republic. It so happened that
there came to our farm for a winter visit an English cousin of my
father's who had become (I do not know how, for it must have been a
rare thing in the seventies) a female doctor in Boston. She used
to tell me, while Jim and Dick were mucking out the chores in the
barnyard, which was their high privilege, about the United States
and the Revolution, and when she saw how interested I was she sent to
Boston and got a copy of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson's _Young
Folks' (or People's) History of the United States_. There it was,
pictures and all--General Gage and the Boston Boys (very neat boys and
a very neat general), Washington crossing the Delaware (hard going),
Washington taking command at Cambridge. "Cousin Sophy" used to read
it out loud to us--a needed rest for Walter Scott--and we were all
fascinated with it, Jim and Dick with the pictures and the soldiers,
but I chiefly from the new sense of the burning injustice of tyranny,
a thing I had never got from history before.

Forthwith the theory of a republic, and the theory of equality, and
the condemnation of hereditary rights seemed obvious and self-evident
truths, as clear to me as they were to Thomas Jefferson. I stopped
short at the queen partly, I suppose, because one touched there on
heaven and hell and the church service and on ground which I didn't
propose to tread. But for me, from then on, a hereditary lord didn't
have a leg to stand on. In the sixty years (nearly seventy) since
elapsed I have often tried to stand up hereditary peers again (I mean
as members of a legislature), but they won't really stay up for me. I
have studied it all, and lectured on it all, and written about it all.
I know all about the British idea that if a thing had existed for a
long time, and if most people like it and if it seems to work well and
if it brings no sharp edge of cruelty and barbarity such as the world
has learned again, then it is silly to break away from established
institution on the ground of a purely theoretical fault. But I can't
get by with the arguments. I broke with the House of Lords, with its
hereditary peers and its bishops voting because they are bishops in
1879--or whenever it was--and the breech has never been really healed.
People from India have told me that no matter how scientific an
education you may smear over an Indian doctor or scientist, put him in
any emergency or danger and back he comes to his first beliefs:
away goes medicine in favour of incantation and charms, and science
abandons its instruments and its metric measurement and harks back a
thousand years to astrology and mysticism.

I'm like that with my underlying Jeffersonian republicanism: back
I slip to such crazy ideas as that all men are equal, and that
hereditary rights (still saving out the British monarch) are
hereditary wrongs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Occasional treats broke the routine of our isolation on the farm, such
as going into Sutton village for the "Twenty-fourth" (of May), the
great annual holiday, or to see cricket matches between Sutton and
other places, such as Newmarket, within cricket reach. For up to that
time cricket still remained the game of the Upper Canada countryside,
the game living on strong as against the competition of Yankee
baseball and dying hard. At present cricket has shrunken in on Toronto
and a few larger cities and school centres. But in the seventies
and eighties it was everywhere. The wonder is, though, that it could
survive at all--it makes such heavy demands--a decent "pitch" of
prepared ground, without which the game is worthless, an outfield not
too rough, and even for decent practice a certain minimum of players;
while cricket "at the nets" is poor stuff without a good pitch and
good bowling, especially if you haven't any nets. Nor can you have
a real "match" at cricket without a real side of eleven or something
close to it. Baseball, on the other hand, is quick and easy and
universal. It can be played in a cow pasture or behind the barnyard or
in the village street; two people can "knock out flies" and three can
play at "rolling over the bat," and if you can't get nine for a game,
a pitcher, catcher, and baseball will do--what's more, the game can be
played out in an afternoon, an hour, or a minute. The wonder is that
the British settlers in Upper Canada kept doggedly on with their
British cricket as against the facile Yankee baseball and the
indigenous lacrosse. I am quite sure that in the township of Georgina
no one had ever seen the latter game in 1880.

Rarest and most striking of all treats was to be taken on a trip to
Toronto on the new railway, which reached Lake Simcoe from the south
by a branch line of the Toronto and Lake Nipissing Railway extended
from Stouffville to Sutton and Jackson's Point Wharf (on the lake).
It was part of that variegated network of little railways--of varied
gauges and plans, all crooked as country roads, all afraid of a hill,
and all trying to keep close to a steamer dock, each under different
ownerships--which represents the shortsighted railway building of
Ontario. Shortsighted? And yet I suppose it was hard to see ahead at
all, in a community that stumbled and fell with every new onslaught
of bad times and fought stubbornly against its forests and its
torrents--half strangled in its own opportunity.

The completion of the railway and the arrival of the first train was
a great event, much ringing of bells and blowing of whistles; then the
train itself arrived by the sash factory and the gristmill. It made
a great difference, too, with commodities, such as coal and oranges,
seen in Sutton for the first time. But, as with most town and village
advances of that date, it just went so far and then stopped. Sutton
fell asleep again and woke only to the sound of the motor horn and the
advent of the tourist, in another world years later.

But for us children a trip on the train to Toronto, a treat that was
accorded to each of us about twice in the next three years, was a trip
into wonderland--England had grown dim. Toronto, even the Toronto I
describe in the next chapter, was marvellous beyond all description.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the most real of our standing treats and holidays came to us on
contact with Lake Simcoe. This grew out of our going to church every
Sunday in summer to the Lake Shore Church four miles away. To our farm
equipment there had been added a "phaeton" for Mother to drive and the
kind of horse that is driven in a phaeton, which is born quiet, never
grows old, and lives on into eternity. The ease and comfort of a
phaeton can be appreciated by riding once in a buckboard (just once
is all you need), a vehicle that means a set of slats on axles, with
a seat on the slats. Its motion is similar to that of the new
"seasickness medicine." A phaeton with steel springs, low entrance,
and two seats can carry a capacity load and attain a speed, on the
level, of six miles an hour. Even at that we walked in turns.

The parish church of Georgina stood on the high bank dotted with
cedar trees overlooking Lake Simcoe, and oh! what a paradise the view
presented. I have often and often and often written of Lake Simcoe,
I know, with a few odd miles left out here and there, its every stick
and stone, its island and points, and I claim that there is in all the
world no more beautiful body of water. Writing it up years ago in a
Canadian _Geographical Journal_, I said:

    "The islands of the Aegean Sea have been regarded for
    centuries as a scene of great beauty; I know, from having seen
    them, that the Mediterranean coast of France and the valleys
    of the Pyrenees are a charm to the enchanted country; and I
    believe that for those who like that kind of thing there is
    wild grandeur in the Highlands of Scotland, and a majestic
    solitude where the midnight sun flashes upon the ice peaks of
    Alaska. But to my thinking none of those will stand comparison
    with the smiling beauty of the waters, shores, and bays of
    Lake Simcoe and its sister lake, Couchiching. Here the blue
    of the deeper water rivals that of the Aegean; the sunlight
    flashes back in lighter colour from the sand bar on the
    shoals; the passing clouds of summer throw moving shadows as
    over a ripening field, and the mimic gales that play over the
    surface send curling caps of foam as white as ever broke under
    the bow of the Aegean galley.

    "The Aegean is old. Its islands carry the crumbling temples of
    Homer's times. But everywhere its vegetation has been cut and
    trimmed and gardened by the hand of man. Simcoe is far older.
    Its forest outline is still what Champlain saw, even then
    unchanged for uncounted centuries. Look down through the clear
    water at the sunken trees that lie in the bay southeast of
    Sibbald's Point. They sank, as others sank before them, a
    hundred years ago; no hand of man has ever moved or touched
    them. The unquarried ledges of Georgina Island stood as they
    stand now when the Greeks hewed stone from the Pentelicus to
    build the Parthenon."

The whole point of our going to church on the lake shore on summer
mornings was that we were allowed, by a special dispensation from the
awful Sunday rules we were brought up on, to go in for a swim and to
stick around beside the lake for an hour or so. The spot was one of
great beauty. The earliest settlers had built a wooden church among
the cedar trees, and in the very years of which I speak it was being
replaced by the Lake Shore Church of cut stone that is one of the
notable landmarks of the scenery of the district. It was built by
the members of the Sibbald family, one of the chief families of the
district, whose sons had gone abroad for service in the British Army
and Navy and in India and, returning (in our day) as old men enriched
in fortune and experience, built the stone church still standing as a
memorial to their mother. A Latin motto (which outclassed me at
nine years old) cut in a memorial stone on the face of the tower
commemorates the fact. The church was built during two of our summers
of churchgoing and swimming. The masons were not there on Sundays, but
we could follow its progress every Sunday, in the stones new drilled
for blasting, in the fresh-cut completed stones, and then in the
rising layers of the walls, the upsweep of the tall roof (one Sunday
to the next), the glass, the slates, and then--all of a sudden, as it
were--we were singing in it.

Better still was it when my mother, a year or two later, 1880, was
able to take a "summer cottage" near the church for a holiday of a
month or so. "Summer cottage" is a courtesy title. It was an old
log building built as a "parsonage," which in time proved unfit for
habitation even by the meekest parson. But for a summer habitation it
did well enough, and with it the glory of the lake and of the return
to the water, which we lost since Porchester. We were like Viking
children back to the sea! So will you find any British children, used
to sight and sound of the sea, shut from the water a brief space in
some inland or prairie town but exulting to get back to their agelong
heritage. So were we with Lake Simcoe: making rafts of logs and boards
before we had a boat, blown out to sea on our rafts and rescued, and
thus learning what an offshore wind means--a thing that even today few
Lake Ontario summer visitors understand. After rafts a flat-bottomed
boat, liberally plugged up with hot pitch, then an attempt at making a
sail and discovering that a flat-bottomed boat is no good--and so on,
repeating the life of man on the ocean as the human race repeats in
the individual its every stage of evolution.

In my case Lake Simcoe was a more interesting field of navigation
then than now, more real. It is strange how our inland lakes have
deteriorated from the navigation of reality to the navigation of
luxury. What do you see now? Motorboats! Powerboats! Speed--sailing
dinghies built like dishes and used for water aquations but with no
connection with sailing in the real sense. And all this in any case
only a fringe that fills the lake-shore resorts, crowds round luxury
hotels, and leaves the open water of Simcoe and such lakes emptier
than when La Salle crossed them.

Not so in the 1880s. Navigation filled the lake. Far out on its waters
a long ribbon of smoke indicated a tug with a tow of logs heading
for the mills at Jackson's Point. Sailing vessels, lumpy, heavy, and
ungainly, and nearly as broad as long, carried quarry stone and heavy
stuff from the top of Lake Couchiching to the railway pier at Belle
Ewart. The _Emily May_ steamer that circulated the lake all day and
all night (in her prime days), with double crew, half of it awake
and half asleep--two captains, two mates, two stewardesses, and two
bartenders. The railways bit off her job point by point and place by
place, the railway to Sutton and Jackson's Point being the last straw
that broke her back. Yet for years after the passenger boats in the
real sense had gone the excursion lived on. _Ho! for Beaverton!_ read
its placards on the boardside fence, _Ho! for Jackson's Point_--and
then it was a summer morning carrying its sons of England, or its
Knights of Ireland, its brass band, its improvised bar, its ladies'
cabin as tight shut and as uncomfortable as being at home--all that
went with Ho! for a day on the water in 1880. And so for years. Then
came the motorcar and killed all that was left of navigation.

And all this time, although we didn't know, for my mother kept it
hidden from us, at intervals my father drank, drove away to the
village in the evening to return late at night after we were in bed,
or lay round the farm too tired to work, and we thought it was the
sun. And the more he drank, the more the farm slid sideways and
downhill, and the more the cloud of debt, of unpaid bills, shadowed it
over, and the deeper the shadow fell, the more he drank. My mother, I
say, hid it all from us for years with a devotion that never faltered.
My father, as he drank more, changed towards us from a superman and
hero to a tyrant, from easy and kind to fits of brutality. I was small
enough to escape from doing much of the farm chores and farm work. But
I carry still the recollection of it--more, no doubt, than Jim or Dick
ever did. In fact, the sight and memory of what domestic tyranny in
an isolated, lonely home, beyond human help, can mean helped to set
me all the more firmly in the doctrine of the rights of man and
Jefferson's liberty.

       *       *       *       *       *

By the end of the year 1881 the "old farm" as a going concern had
pretty well come to a full stop. Bad farming had filled the fields
with weeds; wild oats, a new curse of Ontario farming spread by the
threshing machines, broke out in patches in the grain; low prices cut
out all profit; apples rotted on the ground; potatoes hardly paid the
digging. There was the interest of the mortgage of two hundred and
fifty dollars a year, wages not paid, store bills not paid--just a
welter of debt and confusion. So my father was led to give it all up
and go away to Manitoba, the new land of promise that all the
people on the farms were beginning to talk about. The opening of the
Northwest by the Dominion taking it over had revealed the secret, so
carefully guarded for two hundred years, that what had been thought of
as a buffalo pasture and a fox range, a land for the trapper to share
with the aurora borealis, was in reality a vast bed of deep alluvial
soil, black mould two or three feet deep, the gift of the ages, the
legacy of the grass and the flowers that had blossomed and withered
unseen for centuries. You had but to scratch and throw in the wheat,
and with that, such crops would grow as older Canada had never seen!
But with that no clearing of the land to do, no stubborn fight against
the stumps still all around us on the Ontario farms--empty country and
land for the asking, one hundred and sixty acres free under the new
homestead law and more if you wanted it "for a song." No phrase ever
appealed to the farmer's heart like that of getting land for a song!
In the glory of the vision he forgets that he can't sing and starts
off looking for it.

To this was added the fact that there was rail connection now (1878)
all the way to Manitoba by Chicago and St. Paul and the Red River
route, and that it was known that the new government--which carried
the election of 1878 under John A. Macdonald--was pledged to build a
Canadian Pacific Railway clear across the plains and over the Rockies
to the ocean. And with that was set up a sort of suction that began
to draw people to Manitoba from all the Ontario farms, and presently
beyond that from the old country itself, and in particular to
Winnipeg, a place that had been a sort of straggled-out settlement of
the Hudson's Bay Company, Fort Garry, and now broke on the horizon as
a town whose geographical sight in the bottleneck entrance of the West
marked it as a future metropolis. Hence the "Winnipeg boom" and the
noise of hammers and the saws, and the shouts of the real-estate
agents, selling real estate all day and all night, and selling it so
far out on the prairie that no one ever found it again.

My father was to go to Manitoba not on his own initiative--he hadn't
any--but at the call of a younger brother who had gone on ahead and
was already riding on the crest of the wave. This was "my remarkable
uncle," to whose memory I have devoted many sketches and even the
scenario of a moving picture which I hope will one day move. He
had come out to Canada, to our farm, in 1878, had captivated the
countryside with his brilliant and unusual personality, taken a
conspicuous part in the election of 1878, and passed on to the larger
local notoriety in Toronto. He scented Winnipeg from afar, was one of
the first in, and at the time of which I speak was piling up a fortune
on paper, was elected to the New Manitoba legislature, and heaven
knows what.

In my sketches I referred to my father and uncle as going away
together, which is an error in the record. My father, and presently my
brother Jim, followed.

So we had a sale at the farm at which, as I have said elsewhere, the
lean cattle and the broken machinery fetched only about enough in
notes of hand (nobody had cash) to pay for the whiskey consumed at the
sale.

So my father left for the West, and my mother was left on the farm
with the younger children and Old Tommy, and my elder brothers and
I were sent away to school at Upper Canada College. That was for me
practically the end of the old farm, though the rotten place hung
round our family neck for years, unsalable. For the time being it was
rented to the neighbouring farmer for two hundred and fifty dollars
a year, the same amount as my mother had to pay on the mortgage. The
farmer didn't pay the rent and Mother didn't pay the mortgage; all
debts in those days dragged along like that. But the year after that
my mother moved into Toronto on the strength of a casual legacy from
England that should have been hoarded as capital but was burned up as
income. Then my father came back (broke) from the Northwest in 1886,
and that meant another move back from Toronto to the old farm, but I
was not in it, being a boarder at Upper Canada College. Things went
worse than ever for my father on his return to the farm--a shadowed,
tragic family life into which I need not enter. I always feel that
it is out of place in an autobiography to go into such details. The
situation ended by my father leaving home again in 1887. No doubt he
meant to come back, but he never did. I never saw him again. My mother
lived on at the old farm, because it was unsalable, for four more
years, with eight children to look after as best she could on about
eighty dollars a month and with Old Tommy and his wife as bodyguard.
Tommy's wages had not been paid for so long that he couldn't leave,
but anyway he didn't want to. In his old-fashioned Yorkshire mind
wages due from the aristocracy were like shares in the National Debt.
My elder brothers Jim and Dick had both left home for good, both to
the West, Dick into the Northwest Mounted Police and Jim in the wake
of my remarkable uncle. That made me--my father being gone--the head
of the family at seventeen. But since I was away at school and college
and then teaching school, I was at the farm only on holidays and odd
times. I at last got rid of the rotten old place on my mother's
behalf simply by moving Mother off it and letting it go to the
devil--mortgages, creditors, and all. I don't know who finally got
it. But for me the old farm life ended with my going to Upper Canada
College in the beginning of the year 1882.




MY EDUCATION AND WHAT I THINK OF IT NOW


I came down to Toronto from our old farm and entered Upper Canada
College as a boarder in February 1882. My two elder brothers Jim
and Dick had been sent on ahead (I don't remember why) the November
before. So from this time on, for seventeen and a half years as a
schoolboy (boarder or day), or as a student, or teacher, or as both
college student and teacher together, Toronto was the city I lived in
and has retained all the detail of remembrance and the peculiar charm
of the past which goes with one's own city. Nor did I see any other,
anyway, for about ten years.

Toronto was then just in its final stage of comfortable and completed
growth as a prominent centre of life and industry, intercourse and
arts, before the coming of the electrical age brought the rapid
transit and communication that was to turn it into something ten times
greater; to foster suburban growth, bring great industries to the
fringe of the city itself, feed the country in part from the city
as its base, and turn all such provincial towns into metropolitan
centres. Toronto today, we admit, is ten times the size it was then.
Yet perhaps in a certain aspect the advantage is not all with the new
as against the old. Individual life, now lost in the mass, perhaps
felt larger.

I have written a description of the Toronto of those earlier days in
a book of mine on Canada, which was distributed as a private gift book
and did not reach the hands of the public and from which therefore I
may fittingly quote in these pages:

    "In Upper Canada, henceforth Ontario, Toronto was a commodious
    capital city of 60,000 inhabitants. Its streets were embowered
    in leaves above which rose the many spires of the churches.
    Its wooden slum district was herded into the centre and, like
    poverty itself, forgotten. Where the leaves ended a sort of
    park land began and in it stood the University of Toronto,
    secular and scientific, but housed in Norman architecture of
    beauty unsurpassed. To the west, more rural but less beautiful
    with earthly beauty, was Trinity College, founded in protest
    against the existence of secular Toronto. But down below,
    along the water front, was a business district, built like a
    bit of London, all of a skyline and with cobblestones rattling
    with cabs. The new railways sliced off, as everywhere in
    Ontario, the shore line, vilified with ash heaps and refuse.
    All over Canada, between the vanishing beauty of nature and
    the later beauty of civic adornment, there extended this belt
    of tin cans and litter.

    "Just above the railway lines rose the red brick Parliament
    buildings, the red brick Government House flew its flag, and
    over the way the red brick Upper Canada College set itself to
    make scholars and gentlemen as good as real ones. Guarding the
    harbour entrance was the Old Fort, its frame barracks of the
    same old pattern and roof slope that had already gone round
    the Empire, its ramparts crumbling but its ponderous old guns
    in embrasures still looking feebly dangerous. The tone of
    society was English at the top, but the barbershops spoke
    American. There was profound peace and order, and on Sunday
    all bells and Sunday-best. It seems, as most places do, a
    pleasant place in retrospect. At least it was cheap. The chair
    at Toronto that Professor Huxley tried in vain to get carried
    a salary of 400 and meant an ample living.

    "From the business district the shops ran for half a mile up
    Yonge Street and, beyond that, Yonge Street ran thirty-five
    miles to Holland Landing where water communication began. It
    had a tavern to every mile and plenty of grain wagons to
    keep them busy. The main railway ran through from Montreal
    to Sarnia-Chicago. But from the half dozen little railway
    stations of the Toronto of early Confederation days, there
    radiated, like the fingers of a hand, half a dozen little
    railways with various gauges, reaching out north to the lumber
    woods--Huntsville, Coboconk, Haliburton--and north and west to
    the lake ports of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay. Along the
    stations of these railway lines the horse and buggy and the
    lumber wagon took up the traffic. General stores, each a
    post office, with a near-by blacksmith shop, arose at the
    crossroads, and if there was also a river with a waterfall,
    there appeared a sawmill and a gristmill, and presently, as
    the farms multiplied, a village. Then the village became a
    little town, with not one but rival stores, a drugstore, a
    local paper, and a cricket club. In it were four churches and
    three taverns. One church was of the Church of England, one
    Presbyterian, while the Roman Catholics, Methodists, and
    Baptists divided the other two. On the map of Ontario,
    Protestantism was everywhere, but Roman Catholicism ran in
    zigzags. The three taverns were one Grit, and one Tory, and
    one neither. Many things in Ontario ran like that in threes,
    with the post office and the mail stage alternating as the
    prize of victory in elections. The cricket club is now just a
    memory, gone long ago. Thus the little Ontario town grew till
    the maples planted in its streets overtopped it and it fell
    asleep and grew no more. It is strange this, and peculiar to
    our country, the aspect of a town grown from infancy to old
    age within a human lifetime."

       *       *       *       *       *

Upper Canada College, to describe it more narrowly, occupied all the
space lying along King Street and extending from Simcoe Street to John
Street and backward to Adelaide Street. I have no idea how many acres
this meant, but there seemed lots of it: room for spacious gardens
and big chestnut trees and such in front, the school building, a
large square red brick structure of three stories with ample windows,
occupying the centre and flanked right and left with the masters'
houses (square, separate, comfortable houses, with one at the left
end of the row of buildings more commodious and with a large fenced-in
garden beside it which constituted the principal's residence). Some of
the boys at that time were housed in masters' houses, but the bulk
of them were in a building that stood farther still to the left--the
Boardinghouse, red brick, two stories high, shaped like the letter T,
but with much more crosspiece to the T than the upright. One end of
the crosspiece was the Old Wing, made up of rooms each holding four
boys--the Nurseries, they called them. The other end, still called the
New Wing and only about ten years old, was cut into rooms holding two
boys each. In the Old Wing there lived two resident masters with the
boys, one on each floor. Each had a comfortable sitting room and a
bedroom and the services of a waiter to serve his evening supper.
These, of course, were junior unmarried masters with position adequate
and comfortable to that status. It had grown to be the custom that
young men held this position after graduation in arts and studied
medicine while active as resident masters. A number of men who were
later among the distinguished medical men of Ontario served this
apprenticeship to aid them in their medical course.

The senior boys lived in the New Wing under the care of the senior
resident master, who occupied a permanent position, had a suite
of rooms, a waiter of his own, and lived in what seemed to us, as
schoolboys, magnificent luxury. This was the position held for a
whole generation by "Gentle" John Marland, M.A., Oxon., famous in the
history of the school. The upright of the T was filled with a large
dining room and, over it, a large night study. There was a smaller
dining room across the far end of the New Wing, but it was used only
for midday dinner, when a certain number of day boys took their dinner
at school and the space in the main dining room was insufficient. All
the boys from the Nurseries went into night study from seven to nine
(I think it was), but the senior boys studied in their rooms.

Boys were not allowed to leave the school grounds except on Saturday
and Sunday, but there was a little tuckshop called The Taffy on the
street behind the school (Adelaide Street) to which leave was given
every afternoon. The boys went over half a dozen at a time, for twenty
minutes, according to lists drawn up by the drill sergeant. One could
do oneself very well with five cents a trip--three cents for pop drink
out of the bottle and two cents for two doughnuts or cakes or such
things.

The school at that time was at the height of its reputation and
popularity. There were very few private schools of any size in the
province except the once-famous school of Dr. Tassie in Galt, and the
only "rival" school in a real sense was Trinity College School, Port
Hope. This had been founded, in the interest of the Church of England,
with a special view to educating the sons of its clergy and the sons
of members of the church who distrusted the "godlessness" that they
saw spreading over education in Toronto. All who know the city will
recall its long story of friction as between various degrees of
godliness and godlessness. Governor Simcoe and his aristocratic
settlement at Muddy York were all for the Church of England. But the
members of the Church of Scotland and the Scottish churches couldn't
be ignored; nor, presently, the Methodists and the Baptists. Hence it
was hard to find a way, even if one granted full freedom of worship,
of reconciling the claims of the different Protestant sects and
varieties. This applied especially to the division of the vast area of
public land (one eighth of it) originally set aside, when the province
was created (1791), for the support of the Protestant clergy.

The difficulty applied also to all creation of public education,
notably that of a university. Make it a part of the Church of England
and half the province would be against it. Make it suit all the
Protestants at once and you got it so broad that to the true churchman
it appeared flat, trampled to the ground. Thus it was that when
the provincial university was at last put on a wide basis as the
University of Toronto, a seceding body headed by the vigorous Bishop
Strachan, heir to the Simcoe tradition, founded Trinity University.
Upper Canada College, all through its early years, in fact till 1891,
was financially, and by its endowments, united with the University
of Toronto. Hence came the formation of Trinity College School, Port
Hope, to offset this connection with ungodliness. It was at the time
the only rival. Ridley College (separating low-church godlessness from
high-church godliness) came later, as did also St. Andrews, separating
I forget what from what, except perhaps the crude ugliness of the
Upper Canada College of 1891 from its own rural beauty--a school built
by people who knew what a school was as compared with people who just
took a guess--starting from a deaf-and-dumb asylum or a penitentiary.

       *       *       *       *       *

So the school on King Street was, I say, at the height of its
reputation and prosperity in 1882. There were about one hundred
boarders and over one hundred day boys, but of course the boarders
were, and thought themselves, the school. They had never introduced
the division of play hours and work hours specially adapted for
Warden, as in British schools, with playtime in the best of the
afternoon and school and study time in the worst. School ended
at three, and all the day boys went home and the boarders had the
afternoon to play till teatime. But this division was not specially
made for the sake of the day boys but by the custom of the country.
People forget anyway that darkness falls on autumn and winter
playgrounds far earlier in Great Britain than in the more southerly
latitude of Toronto.

The old school, as I see it, was a fine, decent place, with no
great moral parade about it, no moral hypocrisy, but a fundamental
background of decent tradition. I have elsewhere described what I
have called the struggle of the school to make us gentlemen--or even
Christian gentlemen--with the conclusion that it couldn't be done. We
always looked on it as a false hope ourselves. I think it must have
been Dr. Arnold of Rugby who first said that it didn't matter whether
the school was a school of one hundred boys or of one boy but it must
be a school of Christian gentlemen. Since then all headmasters of
boarding schools have made that announcement in the Assembly Hall, but
they fail to put it over. Certainly it failed with us at Upper Canada:
we knew it was well meant but outside the realm of practical life.
But the moral tone was good. There was little, indeed none, of that
hideous bullying which has been the curse of many English schools;
nothing, that I ever saw or knew about, of that brutal beating,
flogging of boys by masters just one layer short of criminal insanity.
There was none of the "fagging" of little boys as servants for the
seniors, in which many British people seem to exult as a rare
feature of school life but which I personally have never been able to
understand. Church and religious service there was, but not too much
of it, and the little there was was formal and impersonal. We had
Sunday school each Sunday morning, consisting (for Church of England
boys) of reciting the collect for the day. But by the time the master
had read an opening prayer and heard all the collects, then, I think,
Sunday was "all" and he read a benediction. All boys went to church,
according to their parents' preferences. The Church of England boys,
the majority, needed two churches--St. George's near by, up John
Street, and the Cathedral along King Street. There was a master in
charge, but they didn't go in a flock. Presbyterians went to St.
Andrew's and Methodists went somewhere else. Among all the wonders
there were only three or four Roman Catholics.

But the morality of the school lay in the ideas that guided it, being,
of course, the ideas of decent families from which we came. We didn't
lie, except in the sort of neutral zone where lying didn't count, such
as in making up a list for leave to go to The Taffy (the tuckshop).
There was no stealing and indeed very little to steal. Pocket money
was recommended as twenty-five cents a week for junior boys, fifty
cents for seniors. The era of "new rich," of schoolboy luxury, of
ostentatious parents, had not yet come.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has been a singularly fortunate thing for Canada that the
foundation of Upper Canada College, and presently of other private
schools on the same plan, has never created any disturbing division
of education by a crosswise division of social classes such as vexes
England now. As everybody knows, the problem of the "public" schools
(Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and one hundred less-known others, apparently
called public schools because that is the last word that any stretch
of language could apply to them) rises on the horizon as one of the
great postwar problems of England. Till yesterday, as it were,
in spite of the successive advances of political rights, nominal
political equality, England remained a country profoundly based on
class and accepting it. Landed property, hereditary rights, social
class, and the privileges and posts of government held in accordance
with it, was the real basis of British Administration in spite of all
the expansion of legal rights from the Reform Act of 1832 and onwards.

The public schools of England were a part of it, had grown up as a
part of it, and can be thought of only in that light. Generations of
people, not rich, but adhering to the class, gentlemen with a grip
all the tighter for the forces tugging it away, clung to the idea of
sending their boys to a public school, no matter what the sacrifice--a
public school, the old school tie--and then off, if need be, for
British Columbia or Matabeleland. There was often much in it that
meant out of sight out of mind. Parents in an English rectory who said
that "Jack was doing well in Manitoba" would have felt less sure of
it if they could have seen Jack sleeping in straw as the ostler of a
livery stable. But for others a little higher up or more fortunately
connected, the "public schools" and the school tie presently meant
the civil service, the foreign office, the vast administrative range
reserved, not by law but by practice, for gentlemen.

All this is breaking up in England in the new world now shaping. All
the wealth of the old hereditary classes available for endowed schools
and pious foundations is just nothing as beside the national fund of
public money available for buildings, apparatus, and equipment, et
cetera, of public schools in the real sense. The lean kine have eaten
up the fat. The penny-a-week national school of my Porchester days
has grown to the vast science college of today, based on the people's
money and itself only a part, co-operating and competing with the
state education of America and the outside world.

What then are they to do? Just have one set of schools in England, all
maintained by the State? But if so, asks the country rector and the
retired colonel, are you sure that you would turn out gentlemen? Leave
it all alone to the open competition of pounds, shillings, and pence,
people paying for what they want different from a state school or
else going without it? But in that case few public schools could
survive--Eton and Harrow and such, but the bulk, not. Certainly they
could not survive if they tried to adapt their education to the new
demands of practical science, engineering, aeronautics, without which
any school is left behind mumbling Greek. The "classics" held their
place as the equipment for a ruling class. That is all over. No class
can rule that can't understand the science that holds in its hands the
life and death of the world.

Such is the English public-school problem, an included part of the
problem of a classless society. Luckily for us, the problem is not
ours. Give our people cash money enough and they will take a chance on
what class you class them in.

       *       *       *       *       *

So, as we say, it was a good thing that the foundation of Upper Canada
College and its fellow private schools did not create a line of class
division running through the schools of the province, as between
schools for gentlemen and schools for other people. The reason lay in
the difference of circumstance as between Upper Canada and England.
In Upper Canada, from the days of the Loyalists on, all the sensible
people were advocates of schools. Those who came from Massachusetts
and New York knew what they had left behind, as did those who migrated
from Scotland. Hence there grew up in the province an excellent system
of public elementary and presently public high schools, and they got
better and better as time went on, and then the high schools in the
larger towns took on more equipment and a bigger staff and turned
into collegiate institutes. As against this, in England, there was no
public elementary education worthy of the name till the Act of 1870,
and even after the system was set up by the fact that in the eyes of
most people a board school was no place for a gentleman's son.

But in Canada, gentlemen or not, people, even well-to-do people,
living in the big towns mostly saw no reason why they shouldn't send
their sons to high school, where the teaching was excellent and the
companionship corresponded pretty much to what they got themselves in
their social life. The thing was true also the other way round. Many
of the boys sent to Upper Canada were not sent there because they were
specially rich or specially gentlemanly, but because, as in the case
of my brothers and myself, they lived in out-of-the-way places and
there was nothing else to do with them.

All this got truer and truer as time went on, as education became less
and less classical, as science made greater and greater demands on
public money for premises and apparatus. Then came the Great War, and
the splendid record of boys from high-school and collegiate existence
obliterated any surviving notion of the private schools as the home of
an officer class. The case of the Royal Military College at Kingston,
founded in 1876, stands by itself. It was, and is, a technical school
devoted single-mindedly to the profession, with an _esprit de
corps_ and a pride of its own that in no way interferes with other
affiliations and affections.

       *       *       *       *       *

So then there remains only the question, Is a boarding school any good
anyway, except for boys whose homes are isolated from day schools?
Is there anything of value in the life and experience of a boarding
school that a boy cannot get in a day school? It is a question that
has been put to me hundreds of times. And I think that within proper
limitations and understanding the answer is in favour of the boarding
school. I say limitations and understandings. For I would never agree
with the British people of the older type who think a boarding school
(one made for gentlemen) so necessary that they would take a chance on
sending their sons to a bad one than not to any at all. The harm of a
bad boarding school, an immoral place, outweighs one hundred times all
the shortcomings (after all only negative) of a day school. Parents
should never send their boys to a boarding school unless they are
assured of it on the side of a decent moral life. A rotten school does
harm that nothing can ever remedy. So also, in a less vital sense,
does a snobbish school, one whose aim is to take in money (from those
who can pay it in potsful) and turn out gentlemen--as far as boys can
be made so by expensive clothes, expensive habits, premature luxury,
and exotic accents.

Leaving out the rotten schools and the snobbish schools, the decent
boarding school has certain disciplines in life to offer, salutary and
useful, not to be got elsewhere. One is the value of the break from
home, of being compelled for the first time to stand on one's own
feet. It is in choking down the sobs of homesickness that we first
learn how much home has meant, and how fond we are of it, and the
humbler and more dilapidated the home, the more suffocating is the sob
of affection for it. With the break from home we learn a whole lot of
new values--as, for instance, that of the friend in need, the decent
fellow who shows the new boy where everything is and where to put
things away: first thing you know, you are talking to him about your
home and how your mother had warned you not to pack your books the
wrong way into your trunk, and he says that about half his stuff got
bashed up on the train coming down, and so there you are two fellow
adventurers, both smashed up by railway baggagemen. How eagerly a new
boy at school reaches out for such contacts of friendliness, like the
shoots of a young plant on hard ground; how quickly he responds to a
kind accent in a master's tone, to a hand upon his shoulder; with what
penetration he sees that the old drill sergeant, even if half tipsy,
isn't half bad, and what encouragement he finds in a half wink and a
"cheer up" from the jolly old janitor. Then, as the days go by and the
weeks go by, and he begins to settle into the place and have his part
in it, what a new life and pride--something about him, as it were,
that is his, that he has made, a new integument about him like the
shell put on by a crab.

It is this new integument--call it, if you like, this new
fellowship--that gives the peculiar meaning to boarding-school
friendship, even as the years go by and it all turns into retrospect,
to broadening companionship and acquaintance. It is a commonplace, as
often repeated as it is true, that the friendships made at boarding
school are different in kind, deeper in meaning, than ordinary
friendships. And how they last. I am not thinking here of the school
friendships of men who were at school together and, to the good luck
of circumstances, spent their life side by side. I am thinking rather
of those who were boys together at school and for uncounted years, for
long decades, never saw one another, life passing separately for each
of them, yet bring them casually together after twenty years, after
forty if you like, and the passage of the years is just as nothing,
the call of the past bridges it in an instant.

Such has often been my experience, meetings with boys of the old
school whom I had neither seen nor much thought about for half a
lifetime. It was after one of my lectures in a great American city,
a lecture to be followed by a reception, that they told me that there
would be a Mr. Lyon at the reception who told them that he had been at
Upper Canada College with me fifty years before. Did I remember him?
Remember him? What a ridiculous question, remember Eph Lyon, three
years senior to me, one of the stars of the First (Cricket) Eleven: a
big, striking fellow--as a boy I put him at over six feet, say six
and a half--in a cricket blazer, walking back from the wickets to the
marquee scoring tent at the corner of the college cricket ground, amid
the burst of applause that greeted his score of thirty not out? And I,
a college junior, not even fit for the Third Eleven. Remember him? No,
the only thing was the compliment that he remembered me.

So there he was, sure enough, in the crush of the reception, one of
those stand-up-and-talk affairs where one lady was asking me what
I thought of Galsworthy's _White Monkey_ (I hadn't heard of it) and
another telling me that I ought to have gone on lecturing another half
hour. But for me Lyon was the feature of the reception. I admit that
fifty years had altered him. He had turned from a Canadian schoolboy
into an American businessman. He had lost about a foot in height and
most of his width. He said the lecture was fine and that he never came
to them, and then he asked me what became of Old Gentle, and I told
him that all the old school buildings had been knocked down and the
ground remade and rebuilt into great square blocks, and we stood there
in the dust and memory of the falling schoolhouse, the wind from the
chestnut trees of the college garden blowing in our faces. All
about us was the babble of Galsworthy's _White Monkey_ and literary
discussion, but the call of the years had carried us beyond it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Or, similarly, I recall how one day at my club a message came to me to
say that a gentleman from Arizona was downstairs in the lower hall who
said he had been at school with me fifty years ago. I went down, and
there he was, sure enough. Who would he be? Why, Jimmy Douglas, of
course. Who else could he be, though I hadn't seen him? We were in
Form 2A together and in the old boardinghouse together in 1882. "Well,
Jimmy!" I said as I asked him whether he remembered that he had said
to me in 2A that he believed a fellow didn't need algebra. Evidently
he hadn't needed it in Arizona, solid and prosperous, rugged and
simple without it, and, as memory cleared away the haze from his
features, unchanged since twelve years ago.

Another time, in my club also, a man said, "Let me introduce my
cousin," and I exclaimed as I shook hands with what looked like a
tall, very dignified and formal gentleman but which I knew wasn't, but
was just a schoolboy in disguise. "Why! Hullo! Friday!" He laughed. It
is amazing how quickly the barriers break down. "Friday, all right,"
he said, "but no one has called me that for forty years." "You
remember," I said, "how you entered Upper Canada College alongside
of a boy from Cobourg called Crusoe, and after the master had written
down Crusoe's name he said to you, 'I suppose you must be Friday'?"
With that the scene rose before us, the typical master's joke, that
goes such a long way with a class, the subservient laughter, and
afterward, in the playground, the nickname _Friday_, plastered on and
there for keeps.

       *       *       *       *       *

All that, I say, is apropos of the question, What is there in a
boarding school?--to which the answer is that there is a heap.
Incidentally, though I forgot to mention it before, in my day a
boarding school still carried the advantage that it gave athletics,
games, and the life surrounding them. This exclusive aspect is gone in
our present age, when athletics and sports are universal and the new
and wholesome worship of health, strength, and fitness is a dominant
idea of the day. Yet even in athletics the bond of union for the
boarding school is always closer and more real.

       *       *       *       *       *

For me my first initiation into boarding-school life and into the
valley of tears of homesickness in February 1882 was brief enough.
I entered at an awkward time scholaretically, though it fitted the
financial quarters of the year, because all the subjects had been
begun and for the moment I didn't fit in anywhere. The class in
algebra had begun at New Year's, and I hadn't had any, so the master
in charge said to one of the boys, "McKeown, take this boy to the back
of the room and explain to him what algebra is." McKeown did so, and
I don't believe that even the great Arabian scholar, Ibn Ben Swot, who
invented algebra and gave it its Arabic name, could have put it more
exactly where it belonged, as mystery, than did McKeown of Form 2A in
1882. McKeown set out his Todhunter's _Algebra_ and some bits of
paper on a desk. He opened Todhunter at a page marked Examples and all
spotted with x, y, and z, mixed with figures. I had never seen algebra
before. "Now," said McKeown, "you take x," and he wrote it down.
"We'll say it's ten." "Is it?" I said. "Say it is," said McKeown.
"Then, you see, x plus one equals eleven." "But," I persisted, "how do
you know x is ten?" "I don't," said McKeown. "Say it's twelve if you
like." "No, no," I said, "I only meant how much _is_ x?" "Oh, I don't
know," said McKeown, and of course that is exactly what Ibn Ben Swot
would have said, only McKeown felt ashamed of ignorance and Ibn Ben
exulted in it. Indeed he would have explained that the whole point of
algebra is that it enables us to deal with unknown quantities, so
much of this and so much of that, and find out all sorts of results
connected with it, without giving them any single fixed meaning.

I spent three or four days in such class exercises and in standing
up, utterly homesick, and chorusing out declensions and conjugations,
after the old-fashioned system of the day, and in living through
clattering meals that I could hardly eat for homesickness, and in
night study, and in the nursery bedroom with my two brothers, and then
the fourth or fifth day brought it all suddenly to a close. I woke up
in the morning with a headache and my stomach was as red as a lobster,
and that was scarlatina. So the lady matron of the boardinghouse took
me in charge and packed up a bag of my things and said, "And now come
and see what a nice little house we have out behind the school!" It
didn't look to me like a nice little house; in fact it looked just
like a brick coal shed converted into two rooms as a "sanatorium,"
which is just what it was. This was before the days of isolation
hospitals and trained nurses. So there I was, established in the
sanatorium under the care of an old dame, a kinder and a cleaner
version of Mrs. Gamp. My illness was nothing and was over in a day,
and then the next day somehow my mother turned up and I didn't care
how long I stayed isolated, drawing pictures and having her read out
loud to me.

At the end of so many weeks I went back to the old farm and in the
intervals of convalescence went up and down to the red school twice a
week, learning Latin. After Easter I went back to Upper Canada, but in
less than no time it had all changed, all began to feel familiar and
easy. The lessons were to me a mere nothing, because they had shoved
me a class down and I knew it all, and with that I began to make a few
timid friendships and to feel proud of walking with my friends down
King Street all in college cricket caps (dark blue and white) and
hearing people say as they passed, "Those are Upper Canada boys." Oh
my! Eh what! I remember how my bygone friend Chic Sales, that great
artist of the comic, told me that the first time he heard someone say
in a hotel rotunda, "Look, that's Chic Sales!" he threw his head up
so high with pride that he tripped his left foot behind his right and
made a sort of stage fall into the air. Chic had the imitation down
to perfection. That is exactly how my twelve-year-old associates and I
felt when someone said, "Upper Canada boys!" Then came the springtime
and the cricket season of May and June. The college grounds all
beautiful, great days on Saturday afternoons, cricket matches and
heroes, and receptions with great talk, ice cream and cakes, and then,
ecstatic beyond wonder, the close of the term, the school breaking up
in a torrent of oratory, exhorting us to be gentlemen, packing trunks,
and off to take the train to go home for the holidays. My brothers
and I went down to the little old Toronto and Nipissing Station at the
foot of Berkeley Street two hours before the train was due to be made
up and "fooled around" among the cinder head beside the bay, waiting
to start home, and there wasn't a dull minute in all the two hours.

We came back as boarders that autumn, and after that, as I said
before, I stayed on at Upper Canada, passing all through the school as
a boarder and as a day boy and finally as a boarder again. My brother
Jim dropped out to go to "my remarkable uncle" in Winnipeg, and Dick
presently grew so tall that they couldn't keep him there any longer.
Dick couldn't learn anything by any known academic process. They
promoted him out of the first form into the second on the ground that
he was nearly six feet high, but they refused to carry him beyond six
feet. So Dick dropped out and back to the old farm, now occupied only
by Old Tommy, the hired man. Then presently there came the Northwest
Rebellion of 1885, which brought after it that autumn an outbreak of
placards calling for recruits for the Northwest Mounted Police. Dick
ran true to form, made his way to Ottawa, was accepted, and then off
to the Regina barracks. My younger brother Charlie filled in in his
place at Upper Canada as a day boy alongside of me.

       *       *       *       *       *

I look back to the education I received in those years and I find in
it plenty to think about. It was what is, or was, called a splendid
classical education, as it was for a couple of hundred years, in
England and America, looked on as the mainstay of national culture,
the keystone in the arch of civilization; and before that in England
it was the only kind of education and it was embedded deep in theology
and so intimately connected with the Church that it was inseparable
from it. Any form of education not connected with the Church was held
to belong to the devil, as witness the education for which Oxford in
its infant years imprisoned or secluded Roger Bacon for ten years.
There was the Church's education and the devil's education. In the
long run the devil's education has won out. Any nation whose leaders
are not trained in it will no longer survive; any nation whose life is
not based on it, whose people are not equipped with it, cannot last a
generation. In other words, the "survival quality" that was attributed
to the old classical education has passed away, or is visibly passing
away, with the generation of the present leaders.

People who admit they know nothing of the history of education among
English-speaking peoples may tolerate a few words of explanation. All
through the Middle Ages the only education (we are speaking broadly)
was that of the Church. It was carried on in Latin. When the modern
age began, say about A.D. 1500, and printing multiplied books,
education widened and included a lot of what had been the education of
the Greek and Romans, such as the philosophy of Aristotle, which in no
way contradicts the teaching of the Church and could be read side by
side with it, and the great poems and plays of the Greeks, of Homer
and the tragedians, and those of Rome, such as Vergil's account of how
Aeneas escaped from the fall of Troy and founded the Roman nation, and
the great histories, Thucydides' _History of Greece_, and the works
of Livy and Tacitus and Julius Caesar in Latin of Demosthenes and of
Cicero. All this made such an imposing body of literature, especially
when set off in the new glory of print on vellum, that there was in
vernacular English, or indeed in any vernacular, nothing like it at
all. It was so to speak the world's literature, containing all the
wisdom of the world. Even when people in England such as Shakespeare
began to write things that were bitter no one knew it or admitted it.
Many people still don't. A Greek professor, especially if growing old
and apt to sit under a tree and fall asleep over Theocritus, will
tell you, of course, that Greek literature is unsurpassed. Nor can you
contradict him, since you don't know it except by telling him that the
Chinese classics are better still.

So here then was the education that went into the rising glory of
England and with the earliest beginnings of the United States. Oddly
enough it carried with it a fringe, which kept growing and expanding,
of mathematics and physics that had not been part of the education of
the Greeks at large. The Greeks abhorred anything practical (just
as Oxford one hundred years ago tried to ignore "stinks," meaning
chemistry), and they never had any decent system of calculation by
numbers on paper, so that Greek mathematics was queer, odd, ingenious
stuff, as if one worked out puzzles for puzzles' sake. It was
complicated and difficult enough, as when they speculated on the kind
of curves made by slicing through a cone (conic sections), an enquiry
carried on "just for fun" in their time. Only one part of their Greek
mathematics, the art of field measurement, or geometry, was especially
developed into a complete and rounded form, particularly in Egypt, in
the great Greek centre of learning in Alexandria. This was because in
Egypt, with each annual flood of the Nile, land measurement by sight
lines had a special importance. Hence the treatise of Euclid came into
our education intact and stayed there till into the present century.

To what the Greeks had of mathematics, the new English classical
education, as it got consolidated after, say, A.D. 1500, added all
that went with the wonderful system of calculating by giving figures
a "place value" (so that, for example, the figure two may mean two, or
twenty, or two hundred, and so on). We are so accustomed to this that
we take it for granted and no longer see how wonderful it is. The
Greeks and Romans and all the ancient nations fooled round with it and
got even as close to it as the method of counting of beads on strings,
et cetera, but they never learned how to put it on paper and so make
the figures add and subtract and multiply in our present marvellous
and simple method of columns and places. It was the Hindus who worked
this out, but the Arabs put the cap on it by inventing the use of the
figure zero, the round 0 for nothing that means everything.

Luckily for English education, mathematics developed side by side with
classical education not as an equal partner but as an adjacent. This
was partly by the genius of the nation which tends to produce men of
exception as seen in Napier, who invented logarithms, Isaac Newton,
who invented calculus and went, in an effortless way, beyond all known
boundaries, and Halley, who invented Isaac Newton by keeping him at
work. Nor could even Halley keep him at it for good. It is odd that
Newton, who lived to a great old age, was all done with science
relatively early in life, pursued no more discoveries, and felt proud
to be in Royal Service as the Master of the Mint.

But what made mathematics for England was its connection with
navigation. When the era of colonial expansion brought England on to
the seven seas, navigation by means of mathematical astronomy became
the peculiar privilege and pursuit of the British. The Portuguese and
the Spanish had known only the beginnings of it. Columbus was really,
in spite of some tall talk on his part, quite ignorant. He merely
threw a chunk of wood overboard to see how fast the ship was going.
The English forged ahead. The Elizabethans "took the sun." Isaac
Newton himself explained that longitude at sea could be accurately
known each day at noon as soon as someone could invent a clock to keep
time at sea. Even at that the admiralty prize of ten thousand pounds
went begging till late in the eighteenth century. But with the use of
chronometrics and sextants and the compilations of astronomical tables
worked out on shore and applied at sea, and ingenious mathematical
tables of logarithms to apply them with, British navigators led the
world. It was the British Government that sent out astronomers with
captains to observe the transit of Venus in the South Pacific in 1769.
After which the use of mathematics got mixed up with the glory of
Old England and Britannia ruling the waves, and no scheme of English
education was complete without it. Not that English schools took to it
gladly. We are told (in the _Memoirs_ of General Lyttelton) that even
at Eton the study of mathematics was tolerated rather than appreciated
as late as the sixties of the last century.

In all this I am not wandering from the point. I am explaining where I
got my Upper Canada College education from; well, that's where it came
from, from the theologians and the classical scholars and Isaac Newton
and the _Nautical Almanac_.

But the thing that especially consolidated the position of the
classical education of England, as it presently did also that of
America, was the discovery, by experience, that it was a great
training for leadership. This applied particularly to a nation which
had grown not democratic, but parliamentary, a nation where oratory in
the legislature counted for more and more, and where forensic oratory
in free and open counts was one of the great highways to success and
political preferment.

To this was added presently the power of the press, the value of
the written word and the persuading paragraph, things for which the
classical education had, and still retains when most else is gone, a
commanding eminence.

Side by side with classical education, in a position that has slowly
grown from the lowest to the highest, grew up medicine and medical
education: from its earliest beginnings, in black art and barbers'
surgery with its red-and-white rags, out of the mists of astrology and
the incantations of superstition, out of empirical remedies and
old wives' tales, till with the age of science it began to build on
definite organised truth and on knowledge gathered from the facts of
dissection and the observations of anatomy. But medicine was no part
of the education of a cultivated man, and till far down the nineteenth
century the social status of a doctor, other than a court physician,
was dubious and humiliating.

Science remained for the few, for the investigators, for the Royal
Society founded under Charles II as Prince Rupert, a factor in the
national advance of England second only to the Royal Navy, for people
who, like Benjamin Franklin, with electricity, wanted to know.
The list of the great names in science--Priestley, Faraday, Lyell,
Darwin--lies outside of the orbit of academic education.

Such was the classical education. It is my opinion that the world
moved it on just in time and that England especially was saved in the
nineteenth century from degenerating into intellectual stagnation
only by the fact that other forces in the nation, clear outside of its
scholars and all that they stood for, pursued science for science's
sake; promoted invention, applied it to industry and transport, and
presently--by the dead weight of circumstance and opinion--thrust it
into the schools and colleges.

A chief trouble with the classical scholarship was its infernal
conceit. The typical classical scholar developed under encouragement
into a sort of pundit. He knew it all--not part of it, all of it.
What he didn't know wasn't college. The phrase was used long after by
Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, but it might have been used by
any of them from the days of Dr. Busby of Westminster, in the days of
Charles II, down to their last octogenarian successors of yesterday.
They knew it all. That is to say, they knew nothing whatever of
medicine and would have roared with laughter over their own ignorance
of it, with a neat Latin quotation to cap it. They knew nothing
whatever of the geographical and geological globe about them,
replacing it with an intimate knowledge of the Aegean Sea as of 500
B.C. They knew nothing of modern languages, regarding them as a thing
for couriers or dragomen. They knew nothing of the investigations of
natural science, had no vision as to where it was leading, nothing of
its application to industry, nothing of industry itself, nothing of
finance--in fact, looked at in a proper focus, all that they did know
was nothing as compared with the vast portentous knowledge that was
rising on the horizon of a changing world.

Even for literature and the drama, all that goes with the republic of
letters, their point of view was turning hopelessly astray by their
persistent tradition that of course Latin and Greek literature was far
superior to that of our own day. To say this in A.D. 1500 was to state
a plain truth. To say it in A.D. 1900 was to say pure unadulterated
nonsense.

       *       *       *       *       *

The old classical education had at least the advantage that it was
hard and difficult with no royal road. It was as hard as ever a
teacher liked to make it. For witness call in anyone who has studied
Greek moods and tenses or tried to translate the Greek dramatists into
something intelligible. In all this it was miles above a great deal
of the slush and mush, which has in part replaced it, the effortless,
pretentious studies of things that can't be studied at all, the
vague fermentations that tend to replace stern disciplinary work when
education is all paid for and free for all and popular and universal,
provided that it is not made difficult.

The classical curriculum had also the advantage, to be rightly or
wrongly used, that it lent itself admirably to competitive study, to
examinations, to marks, to prizes, to going up and down in class. It
was from that aspect that I made my Upper Canada College education
even less beneficial than it need have been, accentuated its faults
by utilizing its weakness. We had at Upper Canada College the system
whereby each day's class consisted mainly of questions and answers,
that is, either questions on homework done the night before or on
something done at sight in class. The boys sat all along one side or
all across the front of the room. If the master asked a boy a question
and he couldn't answer it, then it was passed on, "Next! Next!" till
somebody did answer. The boy who thus answered correctly moved up
above the ones who had failed to answer. Theoretically, but very
rarely in practice, a question might be asked of a boy at the top of
the class and be passed on, "Next! Next!" with increasing excitement
all the way to the bottom boy of the class, who might answer correctly
and "Go up ahead" in one swoop. Hence the system had in it a certain
element of sport, something of the attraction of a horse race. At
least it kept the class from going to sleep and it made the class do
the work and not the teacher. It always seems to me that in a lot
of the revised education of today, which quite rightly undertook to
modify the severities, the rigor, the physical punishment, and the
needless difficulties of the older teaching, the mistake is made in
the contrary direction. Everything is made too easy. The teacher has
to "sell" the subject to the class, and in trying to make everything
clear and simple it is forgotten that there are some things that can't
be made clear and simple because they are by nature difficult and
complex.

For me the old-fashioned system of going up and down and trying to
move up to the head of the class and stay there proved altogether
too congenial and attractive and helped to give a false bias to my
education. In the junior form, the first and second, I took my studies
easily, didn't bother whether I went up or down, and got a very good
place without trying for it. But from the third form on, I got more
and more drawn into study and over-study till presently I filled all
my time outside of school as well as in. After the third form, by this
continuous industry, I ranked first in everything except mathematics,
and after the fourth form first in everything by learning by heart in
mathematics every possible thing that would let itself be learned by
heart.

Study by this pattern knocked all the reality out of certain subjects.
History for me just turned into an underlined book of which I knew by
heart all the underlined tags, headings, and dates. I knew them then
and I still know all the clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, and
all sorts of dates and lists, and all kinds of headings. The reality
of history gradually was lost from sight behind this apparatus of
preparation for examinations.

The very thoroughness of the old classical system made it still worse
suited for modern education.




TEACHING SCHOOL


I spent ten and a half years of my life (February 1889-July 1899) in
teaching school, and I liked the last day of it as little as I liked
the first. As a consequence I have spoken and written very often and
very bitterly about schoolteaching and the lot of the schoolteacher.
Looking back on it all, I think I ought to retract about one half of
all I said, for I think now that one half of the fault was with me and
only one half with the profession as such. Even at that, it seems to
me a shame that schoolteaching cannot be organised as a profession
which a person can enter as a lifework and in which success should
bring at least the main part of what success means in the other
learned professions such as medicine, law, and the church. As it is,
schoolteaching offers too much at the beginning, too little as the
years go by. The initial salary is better than what anyone could hope
to gain in his opening years at law or medicine. The final salary is
nowhere beside the great prizes the other professions offer. It is
true that in the other professions they may fall by the way, lawyers
without a case and medical men forced out of their profession by lack
of opportunity and glad to earn a living in any other kind of way. In
teaching very few fall by the way; very many rise out of it; but those
who remain in it for a lifetime find, as the years go on, that it
gives them less than what is fair, less than what is commensurate with
other pursuits.

There are certain things without which the life of a person who has
grown up in cultured surroundings and received a cultivated education
is not properly complete, does not stand on a fair level with other
lives and opportunities. Every career should look forward to marriage
as a thing that can in due course and time be accepted, with all that
it brings in the way of children and a home, without a pinch and a
semi-poverty that reduces it to a status not good enough to rank
with that of other professions. With marriage should go a sufficient
command of money to allow for the amenities of life, to permit one to
belong to a club, to buy, within reason, books, et cetera, furniture
and house things, to enjoy art and the theatre and such special
holiday "blowouts" as punctuate the monotony of life's routine. Most
necessary of all is money enough to launch one's children in the
world.

Any man who has that much need ask for no more. Granted that much of
ease and affluence, the rest depends on himself, on what kind of mind
and personality he has. The trouble with our schoolteaching in
Canada is that up to now it does not offer these things. Hence its
characteristic features--too much at first, too little later. An
in-and-out profession through which a series of bright young men pass
on to something better, and in which a certain number of young men,
too dull or too devoted, remain forever. The running stream leaves its
deposit as it flows on, but is the deposit gold or mud?

       *       *       *       *       *

In my case I went into schoolteaching with my eyes wide open, as into
something temporary on the way to a real career. To go into teaching
was a matter of sheer necessity. My education had fitted me for
nothing except to pass it on to other people. And as I have explained,
my mother's finances had come to a full stop with the final exertion
of getting enough money to give the one year of full undergraduate
status at the university for which my scholarship of one hundred
dollars was quite inadequate. Meantime, as my father had vanished into
space, my mother was still on the old farm with eight children younger
than I to look after and with an income of, I think, eighty dollars a
month to do it on. Of my two elder brothers, Jim was in Winnipeg with
some small job in the courthouse, but quite unable to send money home,
and Dick in the Northwest Mounted Police had nothing to spare from his
pay. How my mother managed in the ensuing years before any of us could
help her I do not know. I imagine the answer is that she drifted into
debt and stayed there. Even when we could presently give her money
it was merely applied over the surface of the debt below like a warm
growth of Arctic flowers in the sun over cold frozen muskeg.

       *       *       *       *       *

I found out, by asking those who knew, that my college status as a
third-year undergraduate--for I had taken the first and second years
in one, as already explained--would entitle me to teach in a high
school or collegiate institute, provided I put in three months as a
teacher in training. This new feature was still quite recent, as was
the first instalment of that qualification in "education" (so
called) superadded to the academic qualification of time spent and
examinations passed at the university. From the modest three months of
technical education as a qualification for teaching, the requirement
has now been lengthened in Ontario, as it has in most similar
jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, to one year. It thus
represents as much as 25 per cent of the academic qualification
itself. I have always thought, and still think, this is out of all
proportion. I have always had a very low opinion of the educational
qualification--too low, I am sure--always looked upon it as about 10
per cent solid value and 90 per cent mixed humbug and wind. I have
always felt that the only way to learn to teach is to go and do it,
just as Mr. Squeers, immortalized by Dickens, taught his pupils
to spell _windows_ by going and cleaning them. In so far as the
educational qualification helps to close the profession and keep out
superfluous numbers, I am convinced that the same time and money spent
on an extra academic year would be more to the point.

       *       *       *       *       *

I sent in my application and was duly assigned in September of 1888
as one of a group of half a dozen men and women teachers allotted
for three months' training to the Strathroy Collegiate Institute,
Strathroy being in western Ontario, beyond London.

       *       *       *       *       *

So in due course I got on the train and went to Strathroy. Apart from
trips up and down to Sutton, it was my first railway journey. I had a
wooden trunk tied with a clothesline and something called a valise--I
forget whether of imitation straw or of imitation something else. It
is the kind of baggage I still use. I have never risen to the luxury
of aristocratic baggage as a mark of status. For years I was too poor
to buy it, and when I could I didn't any longer care for it. I think
that Dr. Johnson once said something like that in a letter to the Earl
of Chesterfield, about having a literary position. I feel just as
he did about having a pigskin valise: "Had it been early it had been
kind, but now I am known and do not need it." If it is true that a man
is known, as is indicated in romantic novels, by his baggage, then my
valise places me every time.

So, as I say, I arrived at Strathroy. I left my trunk at the station
and walked up the street, and presently I saw a sign, ROOMS WITH
BOARD, and went in and took a room with board. I think the price
was three a week. I went upstairs and unpacked my valise and wrote a
letter home and said, "Dear Mother, I arrived at Strathroy all right,
but the boardinghouse I am in looks a pretty rotten place, so I don't
expect to stay long." Then I went down to supper, and after I had
finished it I met the landlady coming downstairs and she said, "If
you find this boardinghouse such a rotten place I guess you better
not stay in it," so I was on the street again, less twenty-five cents,
moving on to the next sign ROOMS WITH BOARD.

That was the beginning of my contact with boardinghouses, which spread
intermittently over many years and from which presently I found
much food for reflection. Some readers may recall my _Boarding House
Geometry_, in which was laid down the axiom that all _Boarding Houses
are the same Boarding House_ and the postulate that a _bee line_ may
be made _from any one boarding house to any other boarding house_. No
doubt the origin of those truths reaches back as far as Strathroy.

When I duly found a boardinghouse (across the lapse of years I quite
forget it and where it was), and had entered the Teachers School next
day, I found it all very simple and easy beyond words after the hard
study to which I was habituated. The little group of teachers in
training moved about the school, listened to sample lessons (in no
wise different from the lessons and classes we had all taken for
years), and presently were entitled to stand up and "take the class"
themselves under the supervision of the teacher.

In doing this I learned on the side a lesson on how not to be funny,
or the misuse of a sense of humour which lasted me all my life and
echoed back to me in a strange way nearly thirty years later. The
principal of the Strathroy Collegiate was Mr. James Wetherell, the
well-beloved "Jimmy" Wetherell whose memory is still dear to the heart
of a thousand pupils. He seemed to us old at the time, as all adult
people do to the eyes of eighteen, but he must have been relatively
young, for he lived on and on, passed the opening century, still in
harness when the Great War came, and died at a ripe age later on. He
was a fine scholar, his chief subject, at least the one he liked best
to teach, being English. But he had acquired, as most scholars do if
absorbed in their work and exulting in the exposition of it, little
tricks of speech and manner all his own and all too easy to imitate.
I had at that time a certain natural gift of mimicry, could easily
hit off people's voices and instinctively reproduce their gestures. So
when Jimmy Wetherell, halfway through a lesson in English, said to me
most courteously, "Now will you take the lesson over at that point and
continue it?" I did so with a completeness and resemblance to Jimmy's
voice and manner which of course delighted the class. Titters ran
through the room. Encouraged as an artist, I laid it on too thick. The
kindly principal saw it himself and flushed pink. When I finished
he said quietly, "I am afraid I admire your brains more than your
manners." The words cut me to the quick. I felt them to be so true and
yet so completely without malice. For I had no real "nerve," no real
"gall." It was the art of imitation that appealed to me. I had not
realized how it might affect the person concerned. I learned with
it my first lesson in the need for human kindliness as an element in
humour.

Now when this happened there was in the class, somewhere on a back
bench, a boy of thirteen whose name was Arthur Currie who had
entered the school that autumn. He was destined to become one of
the celebrated men of our Canadian Dominion, Arthur Currie, later on
General Sir Arthur Currie, Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Overseas
Forces of the Great War, the victor of Vimy Ridge, a really great
man. I had occasion to know it, as I served under him for the thirteen
years during which he was principal of McGill. I used in those years,
in public speeches, to refer to the parallel fact that Aristotle had
taught Alexander the Great of Greece, and to say that in my opinion
Aristotle had nothing on me. And since like all other speakers I
prefer an old joke to a new, I worked this one overtime for thirteen
years.

As a matter of fact, I didn't know General Currie as a boy at
Strathroy School, but, with his usual and phenomenal memory, he
recalled me. When he came to McGill I went, as in duty bound, to pay
my respects to him in his office, and I said, for I had just been
reading, as had everybody, his full biography in the newspapers, "I
think, General Currie, I must have had the honour of teaching you when
I was a teacher in training at Strathroy in 1888." He gave me a closer
and more scrutinizing look. "Why, yes," he said, "I recognize you now;
you were the young man to whom Jimmy Wetherell, the principal, said
that he admired your brains more than your manners."

       *       *       *       *       *

The work of the teachers-in-training course was easy and agreeable and
companionable. Hard it was certainly not, and it was useful, provided
that the quantity was kept down to the proportions then existing
and not extended out of all reason, as I think it to be today. As
examination work we had to study two or three books, one on school
management, with discussion of such things as ventilation, et cetera,
and one on the outline of the history of education. This last was very
interesting, but a little of it went a long way. I should think that
any trained student could get all that he needed of the history of
education in a week of reading, I mean as far as its utility in actual
teaching goes. Beyond that he could study it till he was grey with
increasing interest to himself. The trouble with so many of our new
curriculum subjects is that they confuse what is agreeable reading for
old men with what is necessary reading for young ones. As I see it,
the whole of sociology lies in this field, a wonderful subject of
reflection for riper years but hopelessly artificial as a class study
for youth.

The training school ended with examinations, a school entertainment,
and good-bye and good will all round. I found myself a qualified
secondary-school teacher of the province of Ontario and a specialist
in Latin, Greek, French, German, and English. I presume that I still
am.

Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another. So I
found myself back at the old farm with nothing to do but send in
applications for such teaching jobs as I could hear of or find
advertised in the papers. Among other things, I had the honour of
being an applicant for a job on the staff of the newly founded and not
yet opened Bishop Ridley College, at St. Catherine's, a school that
has since traced a long and honourable record of over half a
century. I doubt very much whether my application, to use an upstate
expression, caused any headache to the trustees, seeing that my
application for the position of modern-language master went in
alongside of that of H. J. Cody, the successful applicant who had just
taken his degree in arts that year. Cody had had a phenomenal record
universally first in everything, so that in his year the lists in all
the languages, as in English and history, began (1) H. J. Cody, and
should have added, And the rest nowhere. He began here that long and
distinguished life of service to the Church and to education which
sees him now as president of the University of Toronto. I remember, by
the way, when we, his college contemporaries, heard that Cody had gone
into the Church, we looked on it as a case of a good man gone astray.
We realised the success he was thus renouncing as a great criminal
lawyer or criminal politician, for his college eminence was so
outstanding that he could easily have reached out for any of the great
prizes of life. There was no other way for any college contemporary to
escape competing against Cody except to take a dive clear into another
faculty, and even at that he would be apt in medicine to come up
alongside the similar record of Lewellys F. Barker, later on the
famous Dr. Barker of Baltimore, who was always first in every class in
each subject. I remember that years later I asked Barker if this was
literally true and he told me that there had been an exception, that
once he had been put into third class, and that in the very subject
which he regarded as his best and on which he had written voluminous
examination answers, all, he was certain, correct. Barker told me
further that very soon after the occurrence, when he had come to know
the examiner in question as a fellow doctor and fellow examiner, he
asked him if he recalled how and why the third class happened. "Most
certainly," answered the examiner. "I put you in third class because
I wanted _answers_ not a whole damn book." Those who know the vagaries
of examiners will realise the truth of the story. Barker carried the
bitterness of it throughout the years and never forgave the injustice.
He was fond of telling the story, and at his death it appeared in many
of the notices written of his career.

Meanwhile I was trying in vain in January 1889 to get a job in a
school. Unexpectedly I got one at the beginning of February through
the good offices of an old friend, the "Mr. Park" who had been for
some years our tutor on the old farm. Park, after his tutorship ended
in 1881, had gone back to college, finished his course in arts, and
had gone into teaching and at this time occupied the position of
headmaster of Uxbridge High School. He wrote to me to say that a
modern-language teacher was needed at the school and if I applied for
the post he didn't doubt that his recommendation would get it for me.
This turned out to be true, and in due course I drove over to Uxbridge
and found myself installed as teacher of modern languages in the
bright new red brick high school that had recently been added to the
town's attractions.

Uxbridge was then a town of about fifteen hundred people, situated
nowhere in particular on the high ground between Lake Ontario and
Lake Simcoe, one of those agricultural centres that grew up around a
gristmill and a sawmill when the settlers moved in, grew to a certain
extent, and then planted trees in the street to replace the shattered
forests and fell asleep under the trees. Uxbridge, as its name shows
and as the adjacent township of Brock indicates, belongs among the
settlements that followed the Great War (once so called) when the
Battle of Waterloo and Lord Uxbridge as a Waterloo hero and General
Brock's heroic death at Queenstown Heights were memories of yesterday.
Around the town was settled a fine class of British people, and as
beside my village of Sutton, its main street, with a flood of light
from the shop-windows, looked quite metropolitan. It had the usual
equipment of taverns and churches but was a clean, bright, orderly
little place, dull as ditch-water but quite unaware of the fact.

From the old farm to Uxbridge was a distance of eighteen miles. Today,
travelling in a motorcar over gravelled roads, there is hardly time to
get well settled down in the car in a trip for such a distance. But in
1889 it was a real pilgrimage, not to be done there-and-back in a day,
up and down over one sand hill after another, in winter through hill
cuttings blocked with snow, in spring among sunken roads covered with
spring floods. Nowadays, of course, all such distances have shrunk
to nothing; Toronto Sunday trippers ran out to and beyond Uxbridge
to fish in the streams or drive through Uxbridge (apart from the Main
Street) itself without noticing that it is there. Such as it was,
the town became my home for the next half year, and I owe it all the
gratitude that goes with the payment of a first salary.

I had no trouble with teaching from the very start, no difficulty in
doing it, no question of discipline. There are certain people who from
the moment they step into a classroom present themselves as easy marks
to pupils inclined to disorder, who even provoke disorder among pupils
inclined to silence and attention. I remember such among those who
taught me at Upper Canada College as does everyone else among those
who taught him at his school. Very generally the recollection of such
incompetents is among the fondest memories retained across the years.
Pupils or students look back to the memory of "old Billy," or whoever
it was who couldn't keep order, with a singular gratitude, with a
laughing memory that is all attention. Such incompetents cannot be
trained out of it. They are hopeless from the start. I remember (years
later than Uxbridge) how General Currie at McGill undertook to explain
the principles of class discipline to a young, incompetent teacher
attached to my department whose students were turning his classroom
into a bear garden. "Mr. Smith," said the general, "you can't keep
order. Now listen, you were a soldier in my army, weren't you?" "Yes
sir." "In France, weren't you?" "Yes sir." "Well, then, can't you take
the first of these miserable young ---- (General Currie here used his
own private vocabulary) who starts trouble in the class out on the
campus and try to kill him?" "Yes sir," said Mr. Smith. Yet within
another month or so the class had Mr. Smith beaten to a standstill.
He had to give up teaching and was out in a cruel world without
resources. I have often wondered what would have happened if Mr. Smith
had murdered a McGill student on the campus. But no doubt General
Currie was right. The mere intent to murder, the murderous look, was
all that was needed. Poor Smith couldn't command it.

At Uxbridge I didn't have to murder or threaten to murder any of my
pupils. Instinctively I went at class order in the right way, and when
you know how, it is very simple. It is the beginning which counts.
Face the class. Begin talking to them at once. Get to business, not
with one of them but with all of them. Talk: don't mumble. Face them:
don't turn your back. Start work: don't get fumbling about with a
class list of names and a roll call, which you may pronounce correctly
or may not. Leave all that till later. Start work, and, once started,
they are lost as far as disorder goes. In fact they won't expect any.
Above all, don't try to be funny; feeble teachers attempt a footing of
fun as a means of getting together. The real teacher descends to fun
only when he has established a sufficient height to descend from.

So there I was with my class, all bright and easy with Pass
Matriculation French, out of Pass Matriculation French book, rippling
merrily around. As I was only just turned nineteen, the senior pupils
were nearly as old as I was, one or two perhaps quite as old and one
at least a good deal older. He was preparing for the ministry, and
with my help he ultimately got there. The others in the senior class
were preparing for Pass Matriculation into the University of Toronto,
Arts, Science, or Medicine. Of these, my first pupils, local pride in
Uxbridge still honours the memory of Colonel Sharpe who gave his life
in the Great War.

The teaching of Matriculation French and German was easy to me because
I had been trained in exactly that kind of stuff. In reality it
belonged to that futile and worthless brand of teaching French in
Ontario which has so long disfigured the otherwise high standard of
the province. It was based purely and simply on the final goal of a
worthless examination consisting of translating English into French
and French into English. Observe the result. Pronunciation didn't
matter. Whether I pronounced well or ill, and whether my class
pronounced still worse or rather better, was of no consequence. There
was no test in pronunciation, no requirement of reading out loud. Nor
did it matter in the least whether they understood French when they
heard it spoken. There was no test in dictation, no question and
answer, nothing but written French--dead as a dead language. On the
other hand, there was a regular egg dance of ingenuity in translating
verbal phrases and such back and forward--things like "Give him some
of it; do not give him any of it. Speak to me of them; do not speak
to me of them," and so on, endlessly. Anybody who has ever learned to
translate in this way will never be able to speak or use French. The
English words crowd into his mind. What he does is to think in English
and translate into French. In German things are not so bad. The two
idioms, being so similar in translation, keep tending to merge into
actual use of language, if one will let it do so.

The whole fault with Ontario French arises in the Provincial
examination and floods back to the source from that, like water
checked by a dam. Once introduce dictation as a test of comprehension
and reading aloud as a test of pronunciation, and the whole thing
would alter. As it is, Ontario French isn't in it with French learned
out of a phrase book as best one can with pronunciation given by those
who know it. In any case, language for use can be learned only word by
word and phrase by phrase. We learn to say _carte blanche_ by saying
_carte blanche_; learning off a list of feminines won't help.

But there is my class waiting. I must get back to them.

My salary was seven hundred dollars a year and seemed a lot of money:
$59.33 a month. In a way it was a lot of money. Board in Uxbridge in
1889 was twelve dollars a month, washing about two dollars. All the
clothes I would need in a year would represent about one hundred
dollars, or eight dollars a month, drinks (meaning, say, a couple of
glasses of beer a day, at five cents a glass) about two dollars and
a half a month, the bars being closed on Sunday. That was all the
necessary expenses, and all the remaining money was extra. One hardly
knew what to do with it. There were, of course, no moving pictures, no
soda fountains, no motorcars, no paid dances, no slot machines, none
of the hundred-and-one odd expenses that make the life of young people
today one continuous expenditure of money big or little. I forgot
tobacco in my list above: call it a plug of "T and B" once a month at
twenty-five cents.

I felt so rich on receipt of my first salary that I hired a "livery
rig" (charge one dollar for the trip), a cutter, and drove over to the
old farm, one afternoon to go there and back the next. I have always
hated the care of horses from my early recollections of chores on the
farm, but of course I could, like anybody else, drive a horse if I
had to. I remember that a wild blizzard came on that evening with big
snowdrifts and that I turned into a farmhouse, half frozen, to thaw
out, or to thaw the horse out, I forget which. When I got home I gave
ten dollars of my salary to my mother, the first instalment of relief
to her finance, seeming like the first relief of Lucknow. It proved to
be only the first of plenty, for as the years went by my brothers and
I were able to give her help, and then when two or three of us became
well off we were able to banish all her money perplexities and give
her everything she needed. The long evening of her life, for she
lived to be ninety, paid her back dividends on her past devotion. The
cottage beside the river which my sister Rosamond built for her use
at Sutton remains, a marvel of beauty of site and scene which even the
passing motor tourist pauses a moment to admire. My mother lived
there in a network of perpetual correspondence and casual visits from
children and grandchildren, her house a sort of family centre, a
No. 10 Downing Street, reaching out across the continent. She was so
habituated to being in debt that, manage as she would, Mother
always carried a little cloud of debt along with her. But it made no
difference. We wiped it off the slate every now and then and let it go
at that. Perhaps, after all, there is more in raising a large family,
in spite of all that it entails, than many young women of today are
inclined to think.

       *       *       *       *       *

I worked away contentedly enough at Uxbridge. But of course the
situation carried with it the drawback that, as I reckoned it, I was
getting nowhere. I had dropped out of college and saw no way to get
back and finish the two years towards my degree. To try to save money
to do so on my high-school salary would have taken years and years.
To settle down and try to make my life and get married and live on
a high-school salary was a thing I never thought of for a moment. I
tried to do a little odd study at my college books but did not get
very far, and in any case teaching every day from nine to four
was sufficiently tiring to leave little energy for anything else.
Teaching, like anything else, is immensely tiring to a novice; later
on it gets less and less so in proportion to one's ability to teach.
But it is never easy, except to people who can't teach at all or don't
try to.

On such terms I finished out my first half year at Uxbridge and went
up to Lake Simcoe for those summer holidays beside the lake which have
played such a large part in my life for over half a century. My mother
had again rented the old parsonage, the ancient tumble-down habitation
of the first parson of Georgina of which I spoke before. I had also a
sailboat, acquired in Toronto a year or two before from a remnant of
my mother's temporary affluence and my father's temporary gains of the
Winnipeg boom. It was what was called a double lugger, but I put it
into a higher class when I brought it to Lake Simcoe by getting a
local farmer boatbuilder to convert it into a single-masted sloop.
Operations of this sort, which sound as if they ought to cost a couple
of hundred dollars, then represented only about five dollars plus the
price of a little paint. That was the first of a series of sailboats
of varying sizes and rigs which I sailed on Lake Simcoe and its sister
lake, Couchiching, from those days until now.

The marvellous thing of the good old summertime of those days was how
little it all cost. I remember some years ago, at my present country
house in Orillia, a medical man, a contemporary of mine, explaining
to a group of people how he and another medical student used always to
take a six weeks' holiday of summer camping and that all it cost them
was twenty-five dollars each. The up-to-date auditors could scarcely
believe it, but my medical friend was easily able to prove and
over-prove it. He and his fellow students owned between them a canoe
and a tent and blankets. So there was their lodging for nothing. For
food they had a certain amount of canned beef and canned salmon
or sardines, which, along with fish that cost nothing but the easy
catching, represented a meal bill of, say, ten cents a day each. For
milk they went to farmhouses along the lake and got all they wanted
at five cents a quart, and the farm people felt so mean at charging
anything that they "threw in" a lot of vegetables; or they bought
vegetables and the farm people felt so mean that they threw in the
milk; and if the campers came back a second day the farm people threw
it all in. So there was their board. For light they had a coal-oil
lantern at twenty-five cents a month. As to drinks, it is astonishing
how little young people (not old soaks) drank before the days of
prohibition: an odd glass or two of beer, when in reach of a bar, at
five cents a drink, and a bottle of rye whiskey at seventy-five cents
a quart for first-class liquor, carried along in the canoe for a
"snifter" in the evening. Calculated this way, one wonders how the two
medical students could spend as much as twenty-five dollars each on
their trip.

In the good old summertime of those days our chief diversions
were boating, sailing, swimming, and above all lawn tennis, newly
introduced and all the go. Swimming never took the form of mixed
bathing except for a few "sissies" who might care for it. Girls in
those days, when they went into the water, were equipped from top to
toe with bathing caps, full bathing suits more voluminous than their
ordinary dresses, and bathing stockings and bathing shoes. "Swimming"
for them just meant getting wet with their clothes on. Ordinary
young men of wholesome minds looked on girls in the water as a damn
nuisance. But for tennis they came into their own, since we all played
so indifferently and had so little idea of the smashing game that
tennis could turn into that any girl who could stand up beside the net
and prevent the ball from hitting her in the face did well enough for
a partner. Here again was a cheap game. The grass court cost little
trouble to make, no expert work, and people made it for themselves.
The net cost three dollars and lasted forever, and the balls never got
lost, since we hunted them till after dark rather than lose them.
As yet no one had ever heard of golf, at least not in that part of
Canada, except as a sort of crazy game played in Scotland by knocking
a ball round among sand hills which forbid any other exercise.

But compare again the cost of our lawn tennis of the nineties and the
cost of the golf of forty years later which drove it out. Golf meant
a high cost to make the premises and build a clubhouse and fence, high
annual dues; with that, suburban fares, green fees, caddy fees, tips,
at least one meal at the clubhouse on account of the distance from
home. In the prewar days I knew of many people in Montreal who found
that they had all that they could do to keep up their annual golf
subscription without attempting to go out to the club and play. Yet
in Scotland and in England, where golf links were clipped by grazing
sheep, where the "clubhouse" was just such a small building as might
serve to drink Scotch whiskey in or smoke a pipe in a rainstorm,
golf was carried on for years and years at an annual subscription,
in ordinary country places, of five dollars (one guinea) a year. Many
people have told me of cases of minor revolution when the subscription
was moved up to two guineas. But very likely, for all I know, the game
may have been overswamped by wealth and by the pretense of being rich
that has swamped out for us in America so much of the inexpensive
amusement of the past.

       *       *       *       *       *

The good old summertime of 1889 being ended, I went back with deep
regret to my teaching job, with no particular prospect in front of me.
And then unexpectedly things began to open up indeed and in less than
a month altered my whole outlook. It is possible that the market for
teachers had taken a favourable turn, or it is possible that I had
made a hit as a teacher and that this one or that one may have
spoken of me to someone else, but at any rate, quite unexpectedly and
unsolicited, I got an offer to come to Napanee High School at a salary
of nine hundred dollars--an increase of two hundred dollars in pay. By
all the ethics of the teaching profession the Uxbridge trustees should
have let me go or raised my salary. It is among the few redeeming
points of the teaching profession that a school is not supposed to
stand in a teacher's way: what is a temporary inconvenience to the
school may mean a life advancement for the teachers.

The Uxbridge trustees didn't see it that way: they proposed to hold
me to my contract. Looking back on it as I see it now, they felt that
they had got a good article cheap and meant to hang onto it. They
were, or most of them were, a poor lot. So they refused to let me go,
and I had to accept it with the best grace I could and stick at my
work.

Then right on the heels of this came a real offer, one that meant
for me light out of darkness, salvation out of disaster. Upper Canada
College needed a junior master at seven hundred dollars a year and
offered me the job if I was free to take it at once. This would mean,
of course, that I would go on with my college course towards a B.A.
degree. For the residence requirements in those days were not strict,
involved no actual roll call of attendance, and in any case, since the
Upper Canada School day finished at three o'clock, I would take odd
lectures that came at four or five. What it all meant to me I can find
no words to describe.

But the Uxbridge trustees hardened their hearts, and again they
refused to let me go. No doubt they were more than ever impressed
with what a fine cheap bargain they had picked up. But this time the
refusal was too bitter for me to sit down under it. I asked leave to
come and talk to the trustees in person. They consented, and I went
down to an evening's meeting of the board of trustees and laid my case
before them with something, I imagine, like impassioned eloquence. I
tried to show them how much it meant to my future. I took up no
other aspect of it. I had no precedents to quote, no usage, no real
argument, just how much it meant to me. It didn't seem to touch them.
The chairman explained the difficulty of getting a new teacher when
the term was already three weeks old, and that seemed likely to be
the end of it, when to my surprise an elderly trustee who hadn't
spoken--his name was Britton, and I am glad to honour it--hit the
board table with his fist and said, "Damn it, gentlemen"--or words to
that effect--"let that boy go. Do you think you can keep a boy of his
ability in a place like Uxbridge?" With that the situation was saved:
on a sudden inspiration I asked them to give me a week to find them a
teacher and they consented.

The situation, I say, was saved. For it so happened that "my
remarkable uncle," E. P. Leacock, was on one of those visits from the
West to the East by which he eluded his creditors in the West, and I
was able to enlist his services on my behalf. I have written elsewhere
of "my remarkable uncle" and of the phenomenal career that made him
one of the notable figures of the spacious days of the Winnipeg boom.
He amassed a great fortune, on paper, went up like a rocket, and came
down not like a stick, but with the more varied and graceful descent
of a parachute. I wrote to him in Toronto, and he set to work at once
with characteristic energy, interviewed the principal of Upper Canada
and obtained a few days' delay, and in those days, with the aid of the
teachers' lists and a flood of telegrams (there were as yet no general
telephones), he unearthed a teacher, a modern-language teacher. It
is true that his candidate, when produced, looked far from modern and
short on language; indeed, I believe the good old man was hauled out
of retirement, but he filled the bill and I was free.




[End of _The Boy I Left Behind Me_ by Stephen Leacock]
