"And you must try and get on, Nat, and get lots of learning," he would
often say when we were out in the garden. "You won't be poor when you
grow up, for your poor mother has left you a nice bit of money, but you
might lose that, Nat, my boy; nobody could steal your knowledge, and--
ah, you rascal, got you, have I?"
This last was to a great snail which he raked out from among some tender
plants that had been half eaten away.
"Yes, Nat, get all the knowledge you can and work hard at your books."
But somehow I didn't get on well with the other boys, for I cared so
little for their rough games. I was strong enough of my age, but I
preferred getting out on to Clapham Common on half-holidays, to look for
lizards in the furze, or to catch the bright-coloured sticklebacks in
the ponds, or else to lie down on the bank under one of the trees, and
watch the efts coming up to the top to make a little bubble and then go
down again, waving their bodies of purple and orange and the gay crests
that they sometimes had all along their backs in the spring.
When I used to lie there thinking, I did not seem to be on Clapham
Common, but far away on the banks of some huge lake in a foreign land
with the efts and lizards, crocodiles; and the big worms that I
sometimes found away from their holes in wet weather became serpents in
a moist jungle.
Of course I got all these ideas from books, and great trouble I found
myself in one day for playing at tiger-hunting in the garden at home
with Buzzy, my aunt's great tabby tom-cat; and for pretending that Nap
was a lion in the African desert. But I'll tell you that in a chapter
to itself, for these matters had a good deal to do with the alteration
in my mode of life.