The children were encouraged to get knowledge as some other children are encouraged to get bumptiousness; their parents delighted, and showed the children their delight, whenever a child did something sensible and clever; there was no unintelligent admiration of precocity.
The boys dug their own gardens, and from five years of age each child kept a most careful book of his expenditure by double entry.

Their pennies went chiefly in books and presents, and omnibuses for long excursions out of London.

There was no prohibition as to sweets, but never a penny of these earnest young double-entry bookkeepers found its way to the tuck-shop.

However, a joke among the brothers was the following constant entry in the book of one of them: "Orange, L0:0:1." But no chaff was strong enough to correct that healthy appetite, and "Orange, L0:0:1" went on through the happy years.
At eleven years of age, Ste was packed off to a small private school, and here he distinguished himself in the same manner, though of course on a smaller scale, as Mr.Gladstone did at Eton.

His moral courage, coupled with his athletic prowess, made him the darling of the little school, and the headmaster sorrowfully told his mother when the boy's two years' schooling were over that he would thankfully keep him there without fee of any kind, because by force of character the plucky little fellow had raised the entire moral tone of the school.
And now we come to what I regard as the most important part of our hero's life.