except an illpaid assistantship in some provincial organized Science
School or grammar school. I knew that for that sort of work, without
a degree or any qualification, one earned hardly a bare living and had
little leisure to struggle up to anything better. If only I had even
as little as fifty pounds I might hold out in London and take my
B.Sc. degree, and quadruple my chances! My bitterness against my uncle
returned at the thought. After all, he had some of my money still, or
ought to have. Why shouldn't I act within my rights, threaten to 'take
proceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned to
the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionally
pungent letter.

That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its remarkable
consequences, which ended my student days altogether, I will tell in the
next chapter.

I say "my failure." Yet there are times when I can even doubt whether
that period was a failure at all, when I become defensively critical of
those exacting courses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic process
of scientific exhaustion from which I was distracted. My mind was not
inactive, even if it fed on forbidden food. I did not learn what my
professors and demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt
many things. My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.

After all, those other fellows who took high places in the College
examinations and were the professor's model boys haven't done so
amazingly. Some are professors themselves, some technical experts; not
one can show things done such as I, following my own interest, have
achieved. For I have built boats that smack across the water like
whiplashes; no one ever dreamt of such boats until I built them; and I