Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/27

Rh about industriously pursuing my studies, and that 'a good knowledge of the classics, more especially of Cicero, was the foundation of all that was worth knowing in the humaniora': which I didn't understand, and didn't want to. Cicero was rather a fool, I think.—Mrs. Whittaker, he said, would see that my clothes, etc., were in a fit condition, and she had also been informed that I might have two shillings over and above my usual pocket-money. I felt rather older after that. I didn't tell anyone about it though.

The Whittakers went away to the seaside, as usual, leaving Wallace and me with Margaret, the new maid. (There were always new maids.) I enjoyed these holidays. I bought a pipe and some tobacco, and smoked it one day in Greenwich Park, but I was very nearly ill and very dizzy, and thought I would never do it again. I did though, not liking to be beaten by it; but at last I found the tobacco and matches came expensive, and so left off.

The Whittakers came back early in September, and then I had a new suit bought, and a lot of shirts and drawers and things, so as to be ready to go to Glastonbury.

 

Glastonbury I first kept a diary. Here is an extract from it:

'I don't like any of the fellows here. The fellows in my study are fools, all in the third form, and so of course we are always having our study windows catapulted, and then get it stopped out of allowance. (Pocket-money.) I haven't had a penny since I came, and that's a month! Then look at the big fellows! They none of them care a bit about fairness!—I was sitting on the table in the hall yesterday evening after call-over when Leslie, a big bully in the Remove, shoved me off as he was going by, for nothing at all! I fell on to the form, and the form went over and I hit my head against one of the iron posts. I got up and ran after him up the stairs and caught him up in the passage just before the door of his bedroom. Then I said to