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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 Gaspé 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 Château 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.