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This being so, is it incredibly bold or superlatively simple, on my part, to have ventured to collect into a little sheaf some fugitive sketches of the kind of children I have known during the last twenty-five years?

Perhaps it is, and that being so, I can only quote the lines in which Mr. Kipling has once and for all time summed up the humble plea of the free-lance:

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,

He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;

An’ what he thought ’e might require,

’E went an’ took—the same as me!

Cirencester

1923

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By the people who live in the same terrace they are known as “those dreadful twins.” By the more plain-spoken of the masters at the preparatory school which they attend they are distinguished by an adjective whose meaning is the reverse of “heavenly”; and their schoolfellows are filled with respectful admiration for the boys, the most resourcefully and superfluously naughty of their acquaintance, whose genius for making the most patient of masters lose his temper is unsurpassed.