and the sight of a black man is to him a subject of unfailing and practical amusement, if he can blow himself and a brother up with gunpowder, he feels that time has not been lost, and it is to him a chief delight—although stolen—to travel round at early morn with the milkman, and being foolishly allowed to drive, to take every corner on one wheel. He is skilful in arranging a waterfall which comes into operation by the opening of a door; he keeps a menagerie of pets, unsightly in appearance, and extremely offensive in smell in his bedroom. He has an inexhaustible repertory of tricks for any servant with whom he has quarrelled, and it is his pleasure to come downstairs on the bannisters, and if any one is looking to make believe that he is going to fall off and dash himself to destruction three floors below. His father is aghast at him, and uses the strongest language regarding his escapades; he wonders how it came to pass that such a boy should turn up in his home, and considers him what gardeners would call “a sport” or unaccountable eccentricity in the family. He is sure that he never did such things when he was a boy, and would be very indignant if you insinuated he had simply been a prophecy of his son. According to his conversation you would imagine that his early life had been distinguished by unbroken and spotless propriety, and his son himself would not believe for a moment that the pater had ever been guilty of his own exploits. The Boy is therefore lonely in his home, cut off from the past and the future; he is apt to be misunderstood and even (in an extreme case) censured, and his sufferings as a creature of a foreign race with all the powers of government against him would be intolerable had he not such a joy in living, and were he not sustained in everything he does by a quite unaffected sense of innocence, and the proud consciousness of honourable martyrdom. 

T

 As wild animals are best studied in their native states, and are much restricted in the captivity of a cage, so the Boy is not seen at his best in a middle-class home where he is sadly fettered by vain customs (although it is wonderful how even there he can realize himself). When you want to understand what manner of creature he is, you must see him on the street. And the boy in exedsis, and de profundis too, is a message-boy. 

 Concluding that his son has had enough of the Board School, and learning from his master that there was not the remotest chance he would ever reach a higher standard, his father brings him some morning to a respectable tradesman, and persuades the unsuspecting man to take him as message-boy. Nothing could 

 Prev. P 21/114 next