after thirteen, a drouth descended upon the tropical exuberance of his experience. The lighter foliage of his life withered up. Education fell upon him like a blight, and the luxuriant quick blossoms of childhood were scattered. His sensuous contacts with the world diminished with amazing rapidity. He began to be concerned with words rather than with things; and things shrivelled and died and disappeared under the labels he was taught to attach to them. His education, he perceives, operated like the old-fashioned dentistry, by killing off the nerves and pulling out the roots, so that a man in middle life should find himself with a set of dead and, theoretically, untroublesome bones in his mouth. (Only, it seems, these dead things festered.) His education was designed to make out of a piece of living matter a substantial economic block, useful for home building, useful in the fundamental structure of society. He had been taken, so to speak, out of his own hands by the race, and had been thrust, half alive, into a chink of
