Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 6.pdf/326

Rh a county town, and it was always on a river. Mr. Sandsome never allowed us a town without that colophon. I remember in my early manhood going to Guildford on the Wey, and trying to find that unobtrusive rivulet. I went over the Downs for miles. It is not only the Wey I have had a difficulty in finding. There are certain verses—Heaven help me, but I have forgotten them!—about "i vel e dat" (was it dat?) "utrum malis"—if I remember rightly—and all that about amo, amas, amat. There was a multitude of such things I acquired, and they lie now in the remote box-rooms and lumber recesses of my mind, a rusting armoury far gone in decay. I have never been able to find a use for them. I wonder even now why Mr. Sandsome equipped me with them. Yet he seemed to be in deadly earnest about this learning, and I still go in doubt. In those early days he impressed me, chiefly in horizontal stripes, with the profoundest respect for his mental and physical superiority. I credited him then, and still incline to believe he deserved to be credited, with a sincere persuasion that unless I learned these things I should assuredly go—if I may be frank—to the devil. It may be so. I may be living in a fool's paradise, prospering—like that wicked man the Psalmist disliked. Some unsuspected gulf may open, some undreamt-of danger thrust itself through the phantasmagoria of the universe, and I may learn too late the folly of forgetting my declensions.

I remember Mr. Sandsome chiefly as sitting at his desk in a little room full of boys, a humming hive whose air was thick with dust, as the slanting sun-