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 | LIBRARY ^ 
 
 ^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 a 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 GEORGE MOREY RICHARDSON. 
 
 ^ 
 
 Received, ^August, 1898. 
 
 I Accession No. 7J..^.J.7J Class No. 
 
 W3JX& 
 
SEVEN SUMMERS. 
 
SEVEN SUMMERS 
 
 AN ETON MEDLEY 
 
 BY 
 
 THE EDITORS OF THE PARACHUTE AND 
 PRESENT ETONIAN 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Or 
 
 ETON: R. INGALTON DRAKE 
 
 LONDON : SIMPKIN MARSHALL & Co. 
 1890 
 
To HIM 
 
 WHO FIRST SOWED IN OUR BREAST 
 
 THE FATAL AMBITION 
 
 TO PERPETUATE OUR THOUGHTS 
 
 IN BLACK AND WHITE : 
 
 AND FREELY WATERED THE GREEN SHOOTS 
 
 WITH VIOLET INK : 
 
 YET NEVER DESPAIRED WHEN HIS TOILSOME TlLTH 
 BORE ONLY A HARVEST AND THAT A PLENTIFUL ONE- 
 
 OF YELLOW TICKETS : 
 IN THE HOPE THAT HE MAY REGARD IT 
 
 AS A FOLLY 
 
 RATHER THAN AS A CRIME, 
 
 FINDING NOTHING HEREIN TO GRIEVE HIM 
 
 AND SOMEWHAT TO AMUSE : 
 
 To OUR TUTOR, 
 
 WE DEDICATE THIS INARTISTIC PATCHWORK 
 OF ETON BLUE. 
 
PROLOGUE. 
 
 To the future Etonian who would fain know something 
 of the Land of Promise : to the present Etonian who is 
 unaccountably ready to read whatever other present 
 Etonians are so rash as to write : to the old Etonian who 
 cannot but take some interest in the sayings and doings 
 of his successors : to the Mothers of Etonians, past, present, 
 and future, whose sisterly love for the KINDLY MOTHER 
 of us all is as warm as that of any of her sons : to all who 
 lately watched with friendly eyes the brief but happy 
 career of a certain PARACHUTE whose battered framework 
 now lies rusting somewhere in the Limbo of Forgotten 
 Publications : to all these a book which is the work of Eton 
 boys may be offered in the certainty that they will require 
 no Preface, and that if a Preface be set before them not 
 one will pause to read it. But, for the benefit of those 
 whom adverse fortune has not included in the happy host 
 of Eton boys and Mothers of Eton boys, it may be well to 
 say that this book is an attempt to sketch the inner 
 workings of the Etonian's mind and the inner machinery 
 of the Etonian's life, as they are revealed, not to the 
 Clerical Mudrake, not to the Path-finding American, but 
 to the Disinterested Observer and the Boy who Chalks 
 the Boots. 
 
 OF THK 
 
 ITNIVERSITT 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ON GETTING UP i 
 
 THE B. B. CLUB 14 
 
 THE INNER MAN 30 
 
 CROCODILE 42 
 
 THE BEAGLES 68 
 
 ACROSS THE WALL 85 
 
 THE SHINY FAG 90 
 
 BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT 102 
 
 THREE OLD FRIENDS 116 
 
 THE STORY OF DAGON 126 
 
 AT THE SHRINE OF THE SACRED MONKEY ... 161 
 
 WHAT WE Do AND WHAT WE SAY ... 179 
 
SEVEN SUMMERS. 
 
 
 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 Beastes arise betimes ; but then 
 
 They are Beastes, and We are Men." OLD SONG. 
 
 FOR the comfort of parents in general, nervous 
 parents in particular, and even those worthy but 
 idiotic souls who from time to time have considered it 
 their duty, if not their privilege, to write letters to The 
 Times their privilege, as being asthmatic and rheumatic 
 and gouty and pottering and in many ways totally 
 incompetent to criticise any thing on this earth with 
 decency and equanimity and therein to depict, more 
 or less unfaithfully and libellously and ungrammatically, 
 the fancied dangers besetting any tender nurslings who 
 have been, or are about to be, consigned to the draughts 
 and the dungeons, the drainage and the beds of an 
 Eton boarding-house for the comfort of these, let us 
 at once roundly state that it is our real belief our con- 
 firmed opinion resting on the experience of seven years 
 of school life that nowhere on this earth is it easier for 
 a healthy boy to live healthily than at Eton. They 
 who deny this, err ; they are those who make grumbling 
 a habit and habitual grumblers are some of the tares 
 of Eton harvest fields. Perhaps tares is too good a 
 
2 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 name for them ; rather the habit of grumbling is like 
 the fungus that grows upon rotten vegetation. You may 
 be sure that when an old Etonian takes to throwing mud 
 at his old School, there is a redundancy of nastiness some- 
 where which makes its escape by the safety-valve of a 
 good old grumble on writing-paper. And perhaps after 
 all he is not much disappointed if none of the mud sticks. 
 So the next time he comes down to Eton, do somebody 
 slap him on the back and take him down town and tell 
 him that Eton is very glad to see him and then when 
 he has drunk of the tenpenny that he used to declare was 
 the best beer to be had in the whole of the three king- 
 doms, perhaps he will forgive us and forget some of his 
 grievances and begin to think that Eton is not such a bad 
 sort of place after all. 
 
 Having stated our theory then, let us proceed to explain 
 the reasons which led us to adopt it. The best reason is 
 that every Eton boy is more or less compelled to follow 
 the advice of that excellent proverb Solomon never 
 composed a better which avers that to lay oneself down 
 early and arise betimes is the royal and the only road to 
 health, wealth, and wisdom. To guide the youthful foot- 
 step into such a road, matters are so ordered that the 
 average Etonian may be asleep before ten he must be in 
 bed by eleven : he must be in school by seven o'clock in 
 the summer, or half-past seven in the winter, and he may 
 get up when he likes. Usually he does not like but he 
 gets up all the same. There are creatures we have been 
 personally acquainted with one or two well-preserved 
 specimens who are able to knock off the fetters of 
 slumber, unfold the hands from sleep, and enter an icy 
 
ON GETTING UP. 3 
 
 bath every day exactly as the clock struck seven. It was 
 so easy, they said, you only had to try it once to do it 
 always. You will ensure, they affirmed, a habit of 
 punctuality which will last you all your life. We did try 
 it, for three mornings. We did seek this durable material, 
 for three successive days. The result was, that we were 
 more hopelessly late than ever. There was such a wealth 
 of time before us ; so many, many delightfully lazy 
 minutes, that we dawdled and lingered, and called other 
 people, and stood by the fire, and looked out of the 
 window till cream-coloured Horatius ! five and twenty 
 past and there was that Tardy Book waiting in the office 
 to receive our approval in writing one of the signs and 
 wonders that Eton boys are pleased to call their signa- 
 tures. There too we knew that we should see or rather, 
 we knew that we should not see an erect and bearded 
 form, standing to his doorpost like a Waterloo veteran 
 stern in the performance of his duty and potent withal to 
 repel boarders, when as the clock has finished striking, 
 and the office door is shut, struggling masses of Lower 
 Bo}s a motley crew, the corpulent, the tiny, and the 
 Great Unwashed clamour and push and sway and beseech 
 Sesame to open but this once and they will be punctual 
 ever after. 
 
 There, we knew it. " Later than usual this morning, 
 Thucydides, are you not ? You must get up earlier. Get 
 up at seven. If you get up at seven you will be in excel- 
 lent time for school. You don't get up at seven, I am 
 sure. Come at one." So we came. 
 
 Here, for the benefit of the uninitiated, we may explain 
 
 that when a boy is told to " come at one," it means that 
 
 A 2 
 
4 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 he is to present himself before his form master in pupil- 
 room at one o'clock p.m. in ordinary clothes. We say in 
 ordinary clothes, because it is not allowable to come in 
 cricket flannels, or straight from a game of fives. The 
 punishment part of the thing consists in breaking up his 
 morning into two halves, from twelve to one, and from 
 one to two o'clock, in neither of which halves is there 
 sufficient time for him to join in any kind of game 
 unless you count socking. We should like to protest 
 against the whole system. It is a dangerous and degrading 
 custom. It is a relic of barbarism. Does it not take away 
 Jack's play, and make him a dull boy ? Instead of being 
 a punishment at all, does it not sometimes form an excuse 
 ready at hand to the fat, the indolent, and the loafing, for 
 shirking house games ? Is it not accountable for various 
 forms of petty lying, if Jack finds that to be robbed of his 
 play is not so bad after all when he can spend two hours 
 on end at the sockshop, with a little walk in the middle 
 to give him an appetite ? And when there is " private " 
 from twelve to one, or " extras " from one to two o'clock, 
 is it not rather a pleasure than a punishment to him to 
 call on his division master between whiles, and does he 
 not feel that he has rather scored than otherwise ? 
 Aperiently so. Still, we had to go at one that day, and 
 most annoying it was especially as it was so obviously 
 not our fault. For were we not told to get up at seven, 
 and had we not done so ? 
 
 The Eton boy, on ordinary days, that is, on all days 
 excepting Sundays, Founder's Day, and other non dies, is 
 called in the morning at from three quarters of an hour to 
 twenty minutes before school-time. There is a time, 
 
ON GETTING UP. 5 
 
 when on first awaking, an extraordinary energy pervades 
 the whole mechanism of his muscles. During the few 
 seconds in which this sensation is present, he feels that 
 undoubtedly it would be the work of a single moment, 
 the result of one infinitely brief effort, to scatter blanket, 
 sheet, counterpane, and railway rug to the four winds of 
 heaven at this moment, according to our dear old 
 grumblers, they are rushing under his door to spring 
 five yards into his bath, splash the water all over the floor, 
 dress with incredible rapidity, seize Sunday Questions, 
 Verses, last week's Latin, and last month's Greek Prose 
 sprint to the office, grasp a small and mangled pen and 
 inscribe his name in a copybook. Then he pictures to 
 himself beautifully buttered bun and carefully creamed 
 coffee till three minutes past the half hour, when a 
 leisurely stroll will bring him into school within the pre- 
 scribed three minutes. But alas, such a representation, 
 flattering enough while it lasts, vanishes into thinnest air 
 before his closing eyes, and the dubious inaction of the 
 next five minutes is followed by a sleepy uneasiness, or 
 uneasy sleepiness, which terminates in an inert helpless- 
 ness of mind and body, only to be roused into action by 
 the ding-dong of the distant clock, the rattle of an open- 
 ing door, or the tramp of matutinal bootboys. 
 
 He does get up eventually, with a lazy sort of disinclin- 
 ation to do anything at first but sit on the edge of his bed 
 and inspect things. That is to say, he sits on the edge of 
 his bed and looks vacantly at his chair, his bureau, and 
 his bath and stupidly wonders what his chair is exactly, 
 and why it is standing there, and how deep his bath is and 
 where in thunder his towels are till at last the general 
 
6 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 coolness and airiness of his costume urges him to brave 
 the freezing element at once and get some decently warm 
 clothes on. There we will leave him, now he is up, 
 hoping only that he will be in time for school, and able 
 to find that Greek Testament which is always getting lost 
 and taken to the pound, and then being rescued with the 
 first penny he can beg or borrow in so good a cause. 
 
 But it sometimes happens that he wishes to get up at a 
 still earlier hour, with the presumable intention of becom- 
 ing healthier, wealthier, and wiser than his slumbering 
 companions. In fact, there is a regular class of people 
 who actually do get through most of their work in the 
 moderately small hours of the morning. They get up 
 almost before the night is over we have done it ourselves 
 once or twice, and we should like to have done it often 
 and run through their work in the grey hours of Novem- 
 ber twilight, or perhaps they sit in the sun and listen to 
 the jackdaws clattering round the Chapel towers on a 
 breezy morning in May. It is certainly a delightful time 
 to read, mark and learn only you must go to bed early 
 to enjoy it furthermore, it requires a certain strength of 
 mind to get up when every one else is asleep. Perhaps if 
 one could leave one's bed with the intention of getting 
 forward with to-morrow's work, instead of making up for 
 yesterday's, it would be easier, and put one in a better 
 temper, but we are not certain. When an Eton boy is 
 behind-hand with his work he is always in a bad temper. 
 Not outwardly, perhaps indeed, we have know many 
 amiable souls, whose faces were radiant with good humour, 
 whose mirthful temperament shone sometimes in mild, 
 sometimes in magnificent eyes, and yet who never could 
 

 ON GETTING UP. 7 
 
 get anything done in time, whether it was prose or poetry, 
 French exercise or Greek derivations. And inwardly 
 there was disapprobation with themselves, dislike for work 
 in general, and the burden of something which might 
 have been attempted, and which certainly never seemed 
 to be done. Perhaps they were deservedly forbidden the 
 night's repose which the poet assures us is consequent on 
 either action. 
 
 These are they who are compelled to cut short their 
 dreams at the whirr and the hiss and the ring of the 
 alarum and when that fails, as in time it does fail, to re- 
 call them to the stern realities of Sunday Questions and 
 Greek Testament, they turn to other thoughts. Many 
 and strange are the modes they possess of arousing them- 
 selves and casting aside the burdensome spirit of sleep that 
 is upon them, so potent a puffer of the inevitable Tardy 
 Book. We heard once of a youth, who having during a 
 space of many halves accustomed himself to the ways and 
 means of a lenient and methodical master, had reserved 
 fifteen minutes late in the evening for the translation of 
 an unusually crabbed piece of Sophocles. Having learnt 
 the same wisely but not well, he had just blotted the 
 margin of his Cambridge Text, restored a borrowed pen, 
 and consigned to the depths of an apparent ottoman a 
 middle-sized dark green book with no name in it when 
 in fact, he was on the point of following the ways of sleep, 
 news was brought that owing to the indisposition of his 
 accustomed preceptor, he would be expected at early 
 school by quite another master, and that in all probability 
 the method and leniency of the former would be exchanged 
 for the unaccountable vagaries of fresh tasks and pastors 
 
8 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 new. The first idea that presented itself to his mind was 
 to re-learn his lesson without loss of time : the second, to 
 oversleep himself and wake precisely at that moment 
 which would preclude the possibility of his going into 
 school at all : the third, to arise in the dim hours of to- 
 morrow morning, and more or less commit to memory 
 the notes which should already have become a possession 
 for ever in his brain. 
 
 He decided on the latter course, and set about devising 
 an automatic engine to wake him. Clock he had none 
 his watch was at Meyrick's had been there since he came 
 to Eton. There was an alarum he could borrow, certainly; 
 but last time he used it it went off a week late on a 
 morning, too, when he was staying-out with sympathetic 
 mumps. However, he would try it once again, and 
 design a machine besides to assist its efforts. With such 
 an object in view, he collected all the biggest, heaviest, 
 incorruptiblest furniture in the room, comprising two 
 brass candlesticks, a statue of Samson, seven golf balls in 
 a top hat, three large oil cans, a coffee-pot, and a life 
 preserver, and piled them in pyramids and stacked them 
 in stacks on the bed. Then he poured a box of chessmen 
 into the coffee-pot, and made it into a rattle and fastened 
 everything together with a bootlace. He hung this trifle 
 on the door handle when the door opened, the whole 
 thing was to fall down and clank. He was soon sleeping 
 the sleep of the just. 
 
 Precisely five and twenty minutes after he had become 
 unconscious to the sounding tick of the Hercules American 
 timepiece, borrowed next door, he was aware of an unfor- 
 tunate anachronism on the part of the alarum, which 
 

 
 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 caused it to make a terrific dinning noise, for no apparent 
 reason, at ten minutes to eleven, when it ought to have 
 preserved a decent silence and exploded properly six hours 
 later. It went on and on, beating and tearing and sing- 
 ing away, like an express train in a tunnel, or a wasp 
 blaspheming in a wineglass ; and the noise was utterly 
 unlocateable to boot it seemed as if a live body was 
 steaming over the the floor and buzzing past the bed and 
 bruising around in the basin all at once : and at last there 
 was a sound of many waters and all the works skipped like 
 rams and fell into the bath, where they ticked and chortled 
 away as if nothing much had happened after all. " That 
 will clean them nicely," murmured the victim, and he 
 turned over and impatiently went to sleep. 
 
 At five o'clock next morning, issuing from an obscure 
 staircase at the end of the passage, there might have been 
 heard distant footsteps, echoing over the boarded floors, 
 the timbers of which creaked and croaked under the 
 obvious hobnail : a faint light, apparently connected with 
 the footsteps, might have been seen flitting from side to 
 side, in different directions, and at various altitudes, like 
 the Will-o'-the-Wisp of a Scottish fen, but with a certain 
 regularity of forward motion notwithstanding, that pro- 
 claimed its mover to have business of some kind and the 
 same kind, as it seemed, at the threshold of every chamber: 
 while a harsh grating sound, accompanied by the apparent 
 forward progress of the candle, seemed to indicate that 
 some weighty and flat-bottomed piece of wickerwork, the 
 dry withies of which were continually snapping on obtru- 
 sive nails, was being laboriously pushed, kicked, or other- 
 wise propelled up the passage : the rattle of a chance door 
 
io ON GETTING UP. 
 
 handle, a corresponding swoop with the light, and 
 occasional heavy thuds persuaded the casual observer 
 had there been any casual observer that undoubtedly a 
 living creature owning the hobnails, holding the candle, 
 and opening the doors was pushing a large osier basket 
 over the uneven floor, in careful search of shoes, buskins, 
 and anhydrous K's belonging to the inhabitants. 
 
 Once or twice a door was held open longer than usual, 
 and from within muffled voices, as of semidormant 
 creatures, might be heard giving indistinct directions to 
 the shadowy figure who sought in vain for yesterday's 
 muddy boots : only to retire eventually with a canvas 
 fives-shoe and a solitary pump, inadvertently taken for a 
 pair : once the basket was pushed on from a closed door 
 without any contribution : the inmate was an enthusiast 
 of the laboratory one of Nature's chemists and experi- 
 ence had taught that amid the decomposing remains of 
 what was once a carpet, and the chaotic masses of change 
 clothing, ubiquitous on the floor as elsewhere, it was use- 
 less to hope to find boots which, if not placed outside the 
 door, might be sought and very likely sought in 
 vain in any recess afforded by the hundred and one 
 corners of a very small room with a great deal of furniture 
 in it : one of the requisite two dragged from its lair in a 
 hammock a hammock hung from the top of the door to 
 a hole bored in the mantel-piece : the other enticed with 
 a walking stick from under the bed itself, then adorned 
 by the peaceful form of its careless occupant : and the 
 pair consigned with an impatient thump to their place in 
 the filling basket. 
 
 And now the shadow, the candle, and the basket 
 
ON GETTING UP. n 
 
 approach the end door of all : a hand is laid on the brass 
 handle, and a tentative kick is given to a lower panel, to 
 remove an apparent tendency to stick : the foot recoils 
 and extinguishes the candle ; the hand draws uncertainly 
 back, and the whole figure springs into an attitude of 
 startled apprehension : as crash after crash, bump after 
 bump, and rattle upon rattle ring through the bootman's 
 reeling head, and make his heart thump against the new 
 crochet waistcoat which he had but yesterday donned in 
 view of the approaching winter. 
 
 He pushed the door cautiously open an oilcan hit him 
 on the knuckles he stooped for the boots but the life 
 preserver was too quick for him he trod on one end, and 
 the other leapt up and struck him a punishing blow on 
 the left temple. 
 
 u Lookyeer," he said, as soon as he discovered the 
 nature of his assailant. " I ain't agoin' ter be struck on 
 the 'ed 'ere unawared, nor 'it 'ard on the 'and with a hoil- 
 ken. Whadd'yer dew it for? Yer carn't like it. Its 
 a burnin' shaime, thats what it is. Don't larf. Oh yes, 
 I sees yer larfin'. (The darkness was pitchy). Its gettin' 
 desprit, it is, urn I tells yer so to yer fyce, when a 
 poor man gets 'it on the 'ed unawared the first room 
 'e comes into the dor of. (This was a wicked lie : 
 and how do you come into a dor ?-). Its desprit, it is. 
 Life-preservings do yer call 'em ? I calls 'em murderin' 
 'ammers." 
 
 Then he took the innocent boots and flung them into 
 their place and went on his way in a very bad temper 
 indeed, muttering that it was crool, it was, and it didn't 
 oughter be, and when gen'l'm'n wanted korlin, they 
 
12 ON GETTING UP. 
 
 needn't make others korl too. There, 'e'd sed it, 'e 'ad, 
 and 'e didn't mind 'oo 'eard 'im. 
 
 But the sleeper's object was gained. He was thoroughly 
 awake. So he got up and learnt his Sophocles with the 
 help of Mr. Paley's notes, the simplicity and innocence of 
 which he considered amazing. And when he was put on 
 in school, he didn't know any more about his lesson 
 than he did the night before, possibly less and this 
 astonished him a good deal and when his teacher 
 actually mocked at Mr. Paley, it seemed the amazingest 
 thing of all. 
 
 In the winter, we repeat, the average Etonian gets up 
 early if he is an idiot : if he is not and very few 
 average Etonians consider themselves idiots he gets up 
 about a quarter of an hour before school and dresses 
 neither very quickly nor very slowly, and he comes into 
 school four or five minutes late every day. Unless, 
 indeed, he shirks school altogether. This is not a rare 
 occurence with some : with a few it is the commonest in 
 the world. There is a wild excitement, we have heard, in 
 going to bed at night with a fixed determination not to get 
 up next morning till it is time for chapel. Punishment, 
 three exercises in Bradley's Latin Prose no Herculean 
 task, but one just annoying enough to make itself felt. 
 
 But this determination to avoid early school on purpose 
 is of quite rare occurence. It is somewhat of a degrading 
 character, and derogatory to the dignity of an English 
 schoolboy, but is necessarily an action the consequences of 
 which are more easily calculated when the culprit knows 
 more or less exactly what his punishment will be, and how 
 long it will take him. Average estimate, twenty minutes. 
 
ON GETTING UP. 13 
 
 The way he calculates is as follows. Twenty minutes' 
 punishment in place of an hour's school, and an hour's 
 sleep in the morning to be atoned by twenty minutes' 
 writing in the day. Sometimes an hour's work in pupil- 
 room is meted out, and this is quite a good form of 
 purgatory, because it gets a boy on with his work 
 sometimes and annoys him for a whole hour. The 
 innocent must suffer fcr the crimes of the guilty, here as 
 everywhere else : and the boy who, otherwise punctual 
 and methodical to an exasperating degree a nuisance 
 to himself, and intolerable to others really does oversleep 
 himself one morning, must expect exactly the same 
 punishment as the youth who is charged with the offence 
 three times a half, regularly. 
 
 But the difficulties attending the arising of an ordinary 
 Eton boy for there are a select few, who are excused 
 early school for the natural period of their lives at 'Eton ; 
 what on earth for, we never could make out, but we be- 
 lieve that there were doctor's certificates somewhere telling 
 all about it must not be over estimated : he finds it easy 
 enough on Sundays, when he wants to bathe before 
 prayers : and though, perhaps, no one will severely blame 
 the natural desire for " yet a little sleep, a little slumber, 
 a little folding of the hands to sleep " on a cold winter 
 morning nevertheless, everyone will consider him well 
 punished with Tardy Book and pupil room, and Bradley's 
 " Latin Prose," who takes Solomon's criticism and makes 
 it his motto. 
 
 Alas for the mutability of human fortunes ! As we go 
 to press we learn that the Tariff has been raised. Six 
 Bradleys, now ! 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 " Every coterie is the product of ennui" 
 
 ONE sultry Saturday afternoon last summer, when 
 the School was being very prettily thrashed by 
 the Free Foresters, Ixworth and I were reclining at our 
 ease a stone's throw from the pavilion. I think that he 
 felt hurt at losing his place in the Eleven ; I know that I 
 did with far less justice. Our men were tiring under the 
 burden of long fielding ; and we too were getting bored. 
 
 a Poor fun this," drawled Ixworth. He always weighed 
 his words, and was chary of breaking the most oppressive 
 silence. 
 
 " Thirsty sort of fun," I murmured, half asleep. His 
 eyebrows rose like half moons and wrinkled all his fore- 
 head. Then the unexpected smile shot across his ruddy 
 face, and stretching his vast limbs, " Come to tea with the 
 Club," he said. We drew our hammock-chairs under our 
 arms and went. 
 
 After climbing with some caution the dark and treach- 
 erous stairs of his Tutor's, and running the gauntlet of 
 half a dozen Lower Boys, intent on a game which appeared 
 to combine the most dangerous features of cricket, base- 
 ball, and hockey, we found the Club to the number of two, 
 taking tea in Bucklebury's room. One constituted a 
 quorum, and three was a full meeting. To Bucklebury, as 
 President for the month, fell the arduous task of providing 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. % 15 
 
 for the wolfish appetite of the Member that was 
 Ixworth and the Vice -President. The first things that I 
 noticed on entering the room, half darkened as it was by 
 muslin curtains to keep out the heat, were Buck's big 
 black eyes peering at me across a Vanilla ice. His tall 
 frame was sunk deep in a basket chair ; he wore no waist- 
 coat, and from under his loose ducks emerged a great 
 display of brawny leg and red silk sock. We dress airily 
 at Eton in the dog-days. 
 
 As for Witstock, the Vice-President, he appeared to 
 revel in the heat, and hopped bird-like about the room, 
 brandishing a cup of tea in one hand, and a fragmentary 
 crumpet in the other, talking as usual nineteen to the 
 dozen. He was a cox in Upper Boats, and had hopes of 
 steering the Eight. 
 
 Ixworth stopped on the threshold and surveyed him 
 reproachfully. " Vice, if you eat like that you'll never 
 get your weight down. Crumpets, too ! and in this 
 weather ! You'll sink the boat." 
 
 11 So I tell him," said the President. " He's bound to 
 die, or shoot himself like the man in Pickwick. Man who 
 ate seventy-two crumpets to score off his doctor." 
 " He was the first that ever burst. 
 A try-your-weight machine ! " 
 
 chanted the Vice very gaily. " I tell you fellows straight ; 
 the Eight's all very well, but life without crumpets isn't 
 worth living. Can't be done for the money. Not good 
 enough." 
 
 Then he saw me, pushed a chair forward with his foot, 
 and invited me to walk up and put myself outside a 
 Vanilla. The President crossed his legs and quoted 
 
T 6 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 " Rule XXXII. Any Member may introduce a stranger. 
 No such stranger to be present at private business or to 
 drink more than eight cups of tea." Then to me, 
 " Stranger, you can sit on the Vice's hat. He needs a new 
 one badly. Tea or ice ? Member, just broach a cask of 
 Falernian. Catch the dish." 
 
 The Member caught the glass bowl and disappeared. I 
 knew Buck's room well enough ; it had peculiarities that 
 one did not easily forget. It was big, whereas most Eton 
 rooms are about the length, width and breadth of a 
 medium-sized elephant just large enough to swing the 
 proverbial cat in, at considerable risk to the cat. There 
 was a fireplace ostentatiously disguised in a small cataract 
 of Indian art draperies ; a sprinkling of sporting pictures, 
 only retained because they were relics of his major ; 
 amongthem, "The Midnight Steeplechase," in impossible 
 colours, and certain sketchy representations of round- 
 backed gentlemen shooting or fishing in long gaiters and 
 top-hats all common-place enough. There were some 
 very good etchings, some blue china, which Buck adored 
 because he had bought it "a wonderful bargain," a 
 miniature morocco-bound Shakspere, a litter of clothes, 
 coloured handkerchiefs and letters, books very new and 
 books very old. But there was only a Victory cap to show 
 that the lord and master of this Etonian's den and English- 
 man's castle was a wetbob. The hand of the destroyer 
 had been at work, and the scrolls of gold lettered ribbon, 
 the boat calendars, the racing flags, and Fourth of June 
 hats : in fact all the regular insignia of a manner's room : 
 had perished in the flames on that memorable day when 
 Buck put off Philistinism as a football player kicks off his 
 
THE B. B. CLUB, 17 
 
 muddy boots. Perhaps he was wrong in supposing that 
 he could purchase sweetngss^and light hy the square foot 
 of " oak and gilt ' and artist's proofs, and poesy by the 
 octavo volume all in the compass of a single journey up 
 town. Nevertheless he was as good a fellow as ever went 
 into Stick-ups before his time ; and if he had put off 
 Philistinism, yet he could speak the language of the Phil- 
 istines " gas their shop," as Witstock would say ; and 
 though he said "tell it not," yet I think he secretly liked 
 to know that his good stories were told in Gath or any- 
 where else. As for the daughters of the Philistines, a few 
 of them were as much to his taste as as he sometimes 
 was to theirs ! 
 
 A digression. Meanwhile the Member has been 
 broaching a two pound pot of Keiller's marmalade. I 
 fancy it was Buck's notion that marmalade was an uncouth 
 and sensual word. It was hard at first on the guests 
 of the Club to be offered their choice between Chian and 
 Falernian. An ordinary, uncultivated mind might have 
 preferred to speak of Cairns' and Keiller's Dundee. But 
 the methods of the truly great are unfathomable. 
 
 Tea, even with the B. B. Club, is a very simple affair at 
 Eton in the summer. Tea was there, brewed in a brown 
 earthenware teapot ; bread and butter, and cream galore 
 in a diminutive beer-jug ; and the Vice by much exercise 
 of a shrill voice had found a fag and sent him for a 
 a cargo " of strawberries. How the fag was to discover 
 the meaning of these very vague sailing orders I never 
 ascertained. Personally I should interpret a cargo as 
 meaning at least a cartload. Perhaps he knew by 
 experience. At any rate he reappeared with four baskets 
 
 B 
 
1 8 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 piled tower-wise like the hats on the Hebrew gentleman's 
 head, and with a face that said as plain as print, " See 
 what a good boy am I." 
 
 " Son of a mooncalf ! " said the V. P. " If the little boy 
 had had the sense to bring five baskets, the little boy 
 should have had one for himself. Git !" The " little boy " 
 was if anything rather larger than Witstock. Which 
 shows what it is to have no idea of the proportion of 
 things. 
 
 The Vice afterwards told me the sequel of this incident : 
 how the next day he was having tea alone, and sent the 
 same fag with the same orders ; the boy returned with 
 five baskets, and a look of temperate yearning like that 
 of the British workman on a Saturday afternoon : he 
 evidently expected to receive an enormous surplus. 
 However the Vice proved equal to the occasion. " Silly 
 jug ! " he said. " If the little boy had had the sense to 
 bring six baskets the little boy should have had one for 
 himself. Git !" and the Vice devoured all five, " not for 
 pleasure," as he explained to me with great care, " but as 
 a matter of duty. One must humble one's White Slaves 
 a bit sometimes." Whether the fag ever pushed this 
 system of arithmetical progression any further, I never 
 heard. 
 
 Tea was nearly over when the President awoke from 
 his lethargy to remark, " Vice, read the minutes of last 
 meeting." 
 
 The Vice President uttered an apologetic groan, 
 swallowed half a dozen strawberries en masse, and pro- 
 duced a small notebook from the region of his coat-tails. 
 
 " Saturday, June st, 33oth meeting. The Club met 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 19 
 
 for breakfast. Vice President was in excellent form. 
 His conversation flowed as freely as the coffee." 
 
 " One degree less muddy," said the Member drily. 
 
 " Order ! " cried the President, and hurled a cube of sugar 
 
 that temporarily closed the Member's left eye. "Good shot 
 
 >r a Wet-bob," he added with some satisfaction. The 
 
 r . P. went on. u A vote of censure was passed on the 
 
 President for having supplied an inferior brand of Massic 
 
 in place of Falernian. The Member made some puns 
 
 which in the absence of more entertaining matter might 
 
 have been worth recording, if they were not wholly unfit 
 
 for publication ." 
 
 " Shame ! " I interrupted. " Ix worth, I blush for you." 
 Then in the deep voice we all know so well, " I see 
 nothing for it but to flog you." 
 
 " What with ? " growled the offender ungrammatically. 
 " Name the tools," and his eyebrows were more convulsed 
 than ever. 
 
 "With the poker or the President or something equally 
 painful," I answered. 
 
 "Easy all," shrieked the V. P. "Stop her! Mind 
 your oars bow side. No, I mean, that remark must go 
 down in the minutes for this meeting. Hold hard," and 
 he began to write furiously. " How '11 this do ? 
 
 " At this stage in the proceedings the Public became 
 unruly, and cried Shame in a loud voice, threatening to 
 wreck the building and tear up the fixtures." By the 
 way, are the poker and the President fixtures 
 
 " Or merely ferae naturae ? " suggested Buck from the 
 depths of his chair. He had some personal interest in the 
 question. 
 
 B 2 
 
20 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 " All right," I said. " The Public will simmer down." 
 
 " Then have another ice to simmer in," said the Member, 
 uplifting the china basin, and in another moment would 
 have thrown it across the table. " No, don't," I shouted, 
 just in time, for I was not yet inured to this primitive 
 method of passing dishes. 
 
 Then we lay back in our chairs, and some of us took off 
 our coats, and between spoonfuls of ice we enjoyed mouth- 
 fuls of jerky conversation. Witstock reviled his tutor's 
 tame yellow dog in choicest Pink ' Unese. We talked 
 about our fags as ladies do about their cooks and nurses. 
 We discussed our tutors and the cut of their children's 
 frocks. Buck complained of a dress that made his hair 
 stand on end whenever it appeared in the ladies' seat at 
 Chapel, and Ixworth had an opinion about the colour of 
 stocking that should go with yellow shoes ; ancT we agreed 
 that yellow shoes were only one degree less baneful than 
 yellow boots, and that both were an abomination and a 
 weariness to the eye ; but if ladies must wear them, "red," 
 said Witstock, u is the colour for stockings. On the river. 
 Quite tasty. Oh, 'Arriet and Jemoima ! " 
 
 Then we usurped the functions of the Captain of the 
 Eight and the Captain of the Eleven, and made up'a crew 
 to row at Henley, with Witstock for cox, and a team to 
 play at Lord's including Ixworth : meaning to cheer them 
 up. But Witstock only shook his head dolefully, and 
 said something about ices and cream and the weighing 
 machine at the Brocas, while Ixworth smiled a doubtful 
 smile and let loose his eyebrows ; and they fairly buck- 
 jumped. So we changed the subject to the merits of our 
 respective tailors, and then Buck laid himself out to blast 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 21 
 
 the fair fame of Eton eggs. He asserted that he had seen 
 a tariff made out thus : 
 
 s - d * 
 
 Best Egg ... 6 
 
 New Laid Egg ... ... 4 
 
 Fresh Egg ... ... 2 
 
 Egg i 
 
 " Egg being short for Political Egg, or Election Egg," 
 he explained. That brought us to hard-boiled eggs and 
 Field Days, and the Volunteers, and we remembered that 
 Witstock was a Sergeant a newly created Sergeant with 
 stripes on his arm and a belt across his chest. Now the 
 Volunteers were the one vulnerable point in Witstock's 
 harness he was like a tortoise. There is one place where 
 you can tickle a tortoise, but the chances are that it kills 
 him. I once tried it on a tame tortoise belonging to my 
 tutor's children ; it lived in a window box and was 
 tethered to a string ; I expected that it would commit 
 suicide by jumping over the edge and hanging itself, but 
 it only gave a little sob, and rolled over on its back quite 
 still. I never felt so wicked in my life. However, the 
 children gave it. sal volatile and it revived and ate as 
 much grass as the historic sturgeon ; which shows that 
 tickling improves the digestive organs. 
 
 In the same way you might chaff Witstock for a month 
 without getting a rise out of him, but if you touched on 
 the Volunteers you found a sensitive spot under his shell, 
 and results followed. 
 
 On the present occasion he bore our other chaff" with a 
 face as serene as that of the Christian Bishop in a picture 
 at the Salon. It represents the saintly man being pierced 
 
22 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 with pepper-greased arrows by a horde of naked drunken 
 Goths, and smiling devoutly the while. We were the 
 Goths, drunken on Vanilla ice ; naked in so far as our 
 coats were off, (which according to the Berlin police con- 
 stitutes a disgraceful exposure of the person). So for a 
 time Witstock looked, like the painted prelate, as if he 
 rather enjoyed the process ; but when we set about making 
 a mock of the Corps, he grew fretful, even as (we shrewdly 
 suspect) a Pepper-greased Bishop* might do in real life. 
 
 He did not imitate the tortoise by sobbing, but he put on 
 his pince-nez always a bad sign with him, and drummed 
 on the table with a spoon, and Bucklebury, who was as 
 tender as any woman about hurting people's feelings, 
 began to change the subject. So we talked about one 
 Kinnoul, who sported the uniform of a Highland regiment. 
 And jokes about the kilt and his calves and Highland 
 cattle jokes that would hardly have dimpled the cheek of 
 a three year old baby, and would have saddened a child of 
 ten were made most recklessly and laughed at very freely. 
 " That," as Witstock remarked, " is what comes of mixing 
 ice and crumpets." Presently an unsteady tenor voice 
 somewhere down the passage began to chant scraps of last 
 Sunday's anthem, and the conversation veered round to 
 Lidney, who was Captain of the House and a great light 
 in the Auxiliary Choir, and his latest musical fads. Then 
 Witstock gave us the same anthem with variations, some- 
 what, I grieve to say, in the music-hall vein, until suddenly 
 Ixworth growled out 
 
 "Look here," and he rose as though to go, "if this 
 
 * Publisher to Authors " What is a Pepper-greased Bishop ? " 
 Authors to Publisher " Ask the Red Indians." 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 23 
 
 meeting gets so dashed witty I shall have to resign. I 
 came here to get cool. Too hot to laugh." 
 
 " Also too hot to fight," said Buck, the peacemaker. 
 "Vice, next time you make the Member laugh, I empty 
 the teapot down your neck. Friends will kindly accept 
 this the only intimation. No cards. R. I. P." And 
 Ixworth sat down again. 
 
 Whereupon Witstock, who had hitherto been discussing 
 serious and solemn subjects, with a broad grin extending 
 almost to -the roots of his fair hair, began to make the 
 most idiotic and ludicrous remarks without the ghost of a 
 smile. He worked back to his tutor's tame yellow dog, 
 and declared that he should die happy if only he could see 
 Tony that was the yellow dog boiled and served up 
 with caper sauce ; " or do you think roast with currant 
 jelly ? " 
 
 We put in a good word for the dog. I in particular. I 
 did not know him then. Afterwards we had good cause 
 to change our opinion. But that comes in another 
 chapter. 
 
 Witstock resumed. He painted the joy of carving the 
 tame yellow dog. " I'm a good practical carvist," he said 
 meditatively ; " you should see me make the running 
 with a turkey. I shape very well, so long as the breast 
 goes round ; but when they begin to champ after the 
 wings, why I get a bit weak" 
 
 Then it was that some evil genius prompted me to say 
 u I suppose that's because you got your experience with 
 Boiled Babies they haven't got any wings, have 
 they?" 
 
 There was an awful silence. The sort of silence that 
 
 ;\BRA 
 
 OF THB 
 
 TJNIVERS 
 
24 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 makes one pray for an earthquake or a Revolution among 
 the Fags. 
 
 " Gar 'n," said the Vice at last. " What Lower Boy 
 told you that ? " 
 
 The President stroked his chin and gazed into the dis- 
 tance as if trying to remember whether he had shaved 
 that morning. In reality he was framing a polished 
 period so Witstock used to call them. He brought it 
 out with a downward sweep of his white hands. u The 
 ignorant superstitions of the Public would be very quaint 
 were they not so painfully childish." 
 
 The Vice applauded in an ironically noisy manner. 
 
 The Member contented himself with exercising his 
 eyebrows until they fairly raced up and down his 
 forehead, and beckoned for the marmalade. The Vice 
 flung the pot, the Member caught it deftly, right side up, 
 and then Bucklebury spoke again. 
 
 u To take the lowest ground, as more likely to appeal 
 to the base material mind of the public," tl Thank you," 
 I interrupted u your knowledge of the value which the 
 British Matron places upon her infant should have 
 convinced you that the use of Baby, boiled or otherwise, 
 as an article of diet would be costly and extravagant in 
 the extreme, and as such unworthy of the temperance, 
 sobriety, and high moral tone of the Officers and Members 
 of the Club." 
 
 This was an unusually long speech, even for the 
 President,' and Witstock applauded it with such violence 
 that he broke several plates. 
 
 " Well," I said, " of course I'm very sorry, and all that. 
 But I always thought it was an understood thing that 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 25 
 
 B. B. meant Boiled Baby. And I don't know what you 
 do with Boiled Baby unless you eat it." 
 
 " Why, of course, B. B. might stand for Boiled Baby. 
 I never thought of that," said the Member, somewhat 
 mollified. " But it also stands for Bread and Butter. 
 Just as P. P. does for Parish Priest and Plum Pudding." 
 
 "The Member is drunk," interrupted the Vice. " I'll 
 explain it. You see there are dozens of A. A. Clubs, 
 Amateur Athletic, and Arts Associations, and Artful 
 Anglers, and Affiliated Actors, and Anti-Alcoholic 
 American Acrobats, and C. C.'s aren't so very uncommon. 
 Let me see, there's the E. C. C. C. and the Corpus Christi 
 College Cricket Club, and lots of County Councils, and 
 the Clergy Corporation, and Concentrated Cod-liver-oil 
 Companies," (here he shuddered involuntarily), "and 
 Composite Candles, and Christian Coalheavers. Dozens 
 more. But there isn't a single B. B. Club that any sane 
 being ever heard of." 
 
 " There's the Ancient Order of British Buffaloes," said 
 someone. 
 
 "Blow the British Buffaloes!" said the Vice, rather 
 rudely. ''They're Rosicrucians. No, there never yet 
 was a B. B. Club*, so we are conferring a favour on 
 the alphabet not to mention the people who spend 
 their lives in trying to find out what B. B. means." 
 
 " What a glorious thing it must be," said the President 
 very sweetly and very languidly, "to be able to put 
 
 * Publisher to Authors " I seem to have heard of the Beadles' 
 Benevolent Building Association." 
 
 Authors to Publisher (in strictest confidence). "That also is a 
 Rosicrucian Hedra." 
 
26 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 things like Witstock. Public, there isn't a word of truth 
 in all that rot he's been talking. One would almost take- 
 him for a liar." 
 
 "That may be," said the Vice with a pretty air of 
 sulkiness, "But it's a darned sight better derivation than 
 yours." 
 
 The President turned to me and explained. " I say 
 that it's my own name. Buckle-bury B. B. do you 
 see ? What could be more tasteful ? " 
 
 The Member said something bitter about spiritual 
 pride. " The Club is called after its officers Bally 
 Bargees. It's coarse, but look at those two fellows in 
 ducks, and judge for yourself." 
 
 " Oh ! " retorted the Vice, " if it comes to blooming 
 personalities Ixworth is only a low Dry-bob, steeped in 
 the beastly prejudices of his order. Why not Beery 
 Bohemians ? The Member's room is full of German beer 
 pots." 
 
 " If it comes to thai," replied the Member, " who drank 
 the long-glass three times in one night ? Eh, old blood- 
 horse ? " 
 
 " Order, please gentlemen, " cried the President. 
 " You'll be fighting in a minute. I'll tell you the whole 
 truth," he went on. " The Vice and the Member used to 
 be very naughty little boys, regular out-and-out hot 'uns, 
 a few years ago " 
 
 The Member made signs and wonders with his eye- 
 brows. 
 
 The Vice laughed aloud. 
 
 " Well, we did in school a Roman history which says 
 that ' Agrippina was a Bold Bad woman. She married 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 27 
 
 her uncle and is justly infamous,' and Witstock and 
 Ixworth immediately formed a Bold Bad Club with 
 Agrippina for Patroness." 
 
 " Fine old gal," murmured the Vice. 
 
 " Smart woman," added the Member, " but murder- 
 ous." 
 
 "So that's the real origin of the mystic letters ? " I 
 asked. 
 
 "It is," said the President, "and the Boiled Baby 
 legend was invented by my fag, the Shiny Fag," 
 
 Everyone knows the Shiny Fag by name, if not by 
 sight. For fighting and romancing, as Artemus Ward 
 would say, " he has no ekal ; he holds the belt." 
 
 " But mind you," Bucklebury resumed. " When our 
 dear maiden aunts make enquiries, we trot out some 
 other interpretation : anything sentimental will do." 
 
 " Such as ? " 
 
 " I believe the best of the lot is ' Amalgamated 
 Believers in the efficacy of Bath Buns.' ' Bath Bun 
 Club,' in fact. Con-found you, Witstock !"and he made a 
 leap at the Vice, who had just dropped a spoonful of ice 
 down his neck. 
 
 Crash ! went a Windsor chair into the fireplace. 
 Bang ! and Witstock tripped over Ixworth's leg and 
 shot headlong into my arms : and in about two 
 minutes we were in the thick of a great and glorious rag 
 such as has no equal in the Annals of that or any other 
 house at Eton. Buck's langour had gone down with the 
 setting sun, and he flung himself into the fray with all 
 the ardour of a Lower-boy escaped from pupil-room, 
 while dust rose in clouds from the carpet, and outside 
 
28 THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 the door the Shiny Fag collected a party of his friends to 
 view the proceedings. Presently Ixworth received a 
 wound and came to sit beside me on the window-sill and 
 mop it up. The President and the Vice continued the 
 scuffle. We encouraged them with words and laughter. 
 
 For a time our attention was taken up by some 
 Dry-bobs in the street and we questioned them about the 
 match. When next I looked round, the Vice had driven 
 his opponent into a corner and was pelting him with all 
 sorts of missiles books and boots and towels, and was 
 about to follow up the rest with a statuette the Venus 
 of Milo, I think it was. 
 
 u Not the lady," cried Buck, "anything but that." 
 
 a Valued possession ? " inquired Witstock, examining 
 her critically. 
 
 The President replied that her price was above rubies. 
 Then the Vice saw his chance. With a shrill whoop he 
 snatched his hat from the bureau top, swung the captured 
 goddess aloft by one leg, and fled. 
 
 " Oh you blackguard ! if I catch you ! '' yelled Buck, 
 snatched up his coat and followed in full cry. We 
 watched from the window, and saw Witstock careering 
 down the middle of the road towards Barnes Pool, still 
 hugging his prize : while the President, who had enlisted 
 some allies in the street, came thirty yards behind in the 
 forefront of the yelling chase : both supremely happy. 
 
 Ixworth drew in his head and surveyed the ruins of 
 what had been (and might be again) a pretty room, and 
 spoke : " It always ends in a big bust up. Have some 
 more to eat ? " 
 
 And now I known that when Bucklebury is more than 
 
THE B. B. CLUB. 
 
 29 
 
 usually lazy, and more than usually sentimental, and 
 more than usually infected with mannerisms and 
 eccentricities, he is unconsciously saving himself up for a 
 real good " rag." 
 
THE INNER MAN. 
 
 " dura messorum ilia ! " HORACE. 
 
 N.B. Nervous persons, and all who are subject to indigestion, are 
 recommended to omit this chapter. 
 
 THE Eton boy does not eat jam-tarts. 
 We wish this to be clearly understood, because it 
 is a point on which there has been much misrepresentation. 
 A dear relative of the feminine " sect " once made us a 
 grant of money, with the usual proviso that we were to 
 say nothing about it ; this was good. But she also tacked 
 on a rider to the effect that it was to be spent on jam- 
 tarts ; this was cruel an error of judgment which caused 
 us great internal pain in the region of our conscience ; 
 for, contrary to popular belief, no other more material 
 pains punished our determination to fulfil the spirit, 
 rather than the letter of her wish, and to spend the 
 entire sum in strawberry messes. 
 
 According to unanimous literary tradition, the school- 
 boy's notion of being in Elysium is to sit on the counters 
 of Mother Wigginton's tuck-shop or grub-shop (dear 
 reader, do not shudder, it is kindly meant) demolishing 
 a little mountain of jam-tartlets ; as the humourist of the 
 School Tales puts it, " The Mountain goes away, and the 
 Profit remains behind." But this is a pun, and puns are 
 the bane of civilization, and an insult to the mental 
 capacity of him to whom they are addressed. 
 
THE INNER MAN. 31 
 
 This conception of a boy's ideal is wholly a fallacy so 
 far as Eton is concerned. The Eton boy does not eat 
 jam-tartlets : but he will surfeit himself, after a breakfast 
 sufficient for a sea-captain, on meringues and cream and 
 oyster-patties, and will crown the edifice with bananas ; 
 he will lay the seeds of life-long dyspepsia by vast post- 
 prandial debauches on mulligatawny soup and scolloped 
 prawns, filling up the interstices with chocolate cream : 
 indeed the Fourth Former who socks for business (in 
 contradistinction to the Unclassed, who is a mere dilet- 
 tante and dabbles in it for pleasure's sake) does not 
 consider himself ready for action until he has laid a solid 
 foundation of tutorial beef or mutton. Then, always 
 excepting jam-tarts, there is nothing drinkable or eatable 
 under the sun that he will not swallow and feel the better 
 for at any time of day. 
 
 We say advisedly at any time of day : because the 
 Schoolboy Stories would lead an unenlightened reader to 
 suppose that vast midnight banquets or Belshazzars 
 were rather the rule than otherwise among the choice 
 spirits of our great public schools. We have heard of the 
 choice spirits at Eton ; of the nocturnal orgies never. 
 
 The question is one that calls for inquiry. We have 
 investigated it, and gather from these trustworthy 
 sources the Schoolboy Stories that it is the commonest 
 thing in the world for the advent of a hamper (some 
 authorities read "grub-hamper") to cause a complete revo- 
 lution in the sentiments of the community with regard 
 to " Fatty." Please notice " Fatty " : without the dis- 
 tinguishing mark none is genuine. u Fatty " is a roomy, 
 bulky person, of the figure euphemistically described in 
 
32 THE INNER MAN. 
 
 catalogues of Male Underclothing or Lingerie as " Large 
 Men's." Only he is a small boy. 
 
 According to " Evelyn : or His Maiden Aunfs Shield 
 in Trouble, by Lydia Marsh," (we are still in doubt whether 
 it was Evelyn or his Maiden Aunt or the Shield that was 
 in trouble) before the hamper came it was rather u the 
 thing " for the Captain of the School and the Prefect of 
 Quad (what in the name of the Public Schools Commission 
 is a Prefect of Quad, and what would he look like in a 
 cage ?) to kick " Fatty," and toast him before the fire. Now 
 the fair authoress draws a dramatic picture of the Venal 
 Captain and the Mercenary Prefect flocking around like 
 flies and wheedling him for an invitation to the feast. 
 The contents of the hamper are graphically described as 
 nuts, apples, jam tartlets (as before) and bloater-paste. Not 
 content with these glorious delicacies, the u young rascals " 
 largely augment them by the aid of " Tim, the boot-boy ;" 
 and six bottles of ginger-beer (O monstrous iniquity !) are 
 drawn up to the window with a rope of knotted towels. 
 
 These choice viands are spread upon u Fatty's " bed ; 
 but on the manner of consuming them our authorities 
 differ. According to " Evelyn, or H.M.A. S. I. T." the 
 bloater-paste is used as an excellent substitute for butter 
 on the jam-tartlets. But li The Sixth Form at Badger - 
 combe" a work to whose testimony we attribute great 
 weight, appears to indicate that the bloater-paste is eaten 
 first, with a corkscrew for fork in common among five, 
 the jam-tarts following by way of dessert. This, however, 
 is a small point, of antiquarian rather than of general 
 interest. 
 
 These attractive and picturesque revels are usually 
 
THE INNER MAN. 33 
 
 broken in upon by the Master, of whom it is said that 
 he is " known to his irreverent young charges as Old 
 Goggles." It were interesting, but perhaps unprofitable, 
 to inquire the precise meaning of this phrase. Cavalry 
 charges we know, and pastoral charges we know, but 
 what is an irreverent young charge ? 
 
 Another feat of waistcoat-heroism which is supposed to 
 be common at Public Schools, is that of plundering 
 neighbouring farmers : sufficiently ignoble at first sight, 
 but frequently expected by romantic ladies from their 
 brothers, nephews and cousins (not from their sons a 
 mother feels tenderly about the risk of a flogging). " Of 
 course, Charlie, you get out at night and rob hen-roosts 
 and orchards. Dorft you ? Don't you ? I thought all 
 boys did ! " A few questions of this sort are calculated 
 to wreck all previously conceived notions of morality. 
 They are usually accompanied by more or less unhistorical 
 allusions to the early anecdotage of Shakspere, or Nelson, 
 or Washington, or Clive men who succeeded in the most 
 varied walks of life solely through the courage and 
 versatility which they developed by early essays in petty 
 larceny. 
 
 In the same way poaching is sometimes encouraged ; 
 an illustrious athlete once told us almost with tears that 
 he was an object of contumely and scorn to his venerable 
 grandmother simply because he was not an accomplished 
 deerstealer. " Your grandfather, Henry," she would say, 
 " has often told me how he and his friends used to carry 
 off the deer from Windsor Park," presumably vi et 
 blunder bis. This is teaching the young idea to shoot 
 with a vengeance ! 
 
 C 
 
34 THE INNER MAN. 
 
 It may safely be said that Socking, like distemper and 
 measles and falling in love, is a disease ; a few escape it 
 altogether ; the majority have one attack and are rid of it. 
 It lasts longer than measles from a year to three years ; 
 but the length of its duration, like that of Love, depends 
 partly on circumstances, partly on the violence with 
 which the attack begins. Usually the worst symptoms 
 disappear when the patient enters Fifth Form. There is 
 no certain remedy ; it may afford some consolation to 
 mothers to know that boys rarely suffer any discomfort, 
 still more rarely damage their constitutions, while under- 
 going the disease. 
 
 Which is not true of the other epidemic. 
 
 It will, however, be interesting to discover the means by 
 which the evil, if such it can be called, is propagated and 
 disseminated. First and foremost comes the Sock-cad, of 
 whom some description may not be out of place. 
 
 He is not unfrequently of Semitic parentage ; but it 
 were base flattery to call his cast of countenance Hebraic. 
 He wears loud checks, like the Stage Hero off duty, but 
 unlike the latter's, his features and his conduct cannot be 
 called fair and square ; rather, his dealings are as shady 
 as his complexion, and his statements as hollow as his 
 visage. His name is a mystery ; the sobriquet by which 
 he is known to his fellow-practitioners is as likely as not 
 unfit for publication ; but he aspires to be called " Joby." 
 
 Now it is the immemorial prerogative of moustachioed 
 men who sell balls and buns and lemonade at the Fives- 
 courts to be called Joby. The Sock-cad's highest ambition 
 (which he has not the smallest prospect of realizing), is to 
 succeed to this post and this title, to make his fortune 
 
THE INNER MAN. 35 
 
 and retire to an unshaven old age in a four-roomed villa at 
 Slough, with a Pink ' Un (a newspaper, not a baby) on 
 his knees and a glass of u something stiff" at his side. 
 As a matter of fact he will continue to the last on the 
 same tortuous paths to the grave, consistent only in his 
 own erroneous interpretation of the Multiplication Table. 
 
 The habits of the animal are peculiar. He plies his 
 nefarious calling chiefly in summer about the bathing- 
 places. In autumn he is employed in collecting his debts, 
 and, with a specious show of providence, in laying up 
 good store of ill-earned gains for the winter. During the 
 winter he is supposed to lie (though he does that all the 
 year) in a dormant state underground. In the spring he 
 reappears in comparatively new second-hand clothes, and 
 sells flowers of an inferior kind until the bathing-season 
 begins, when he is at it again, and sits on his basket to 
 drain the pockets and poison the fortunately adamantine 
 interiors of guileless Lower Boys. 
 
 " Pay me next Half, sir," is his motto. Perhaps in the 
 end the " tick " may amount to fifteen shillings ; but in 
 the holidays the Sock-cad has plenty of time for laborious 
 mathematical evolutions ; he takes his bill and writes 
 twice the amount, throws in a few additional halfpence to 
 give it an air of probability, and awaits his victim at the 
 corners of the streets. The snake has cast his slough ; 
 red tie and gaudy checks are replaced by a glossy 
 mackintosh, whose rigid folds are symbolic of his newly- 
 acquired moral rectitude. Payment he accepts with 
 lordly condescension ; any hint of fraud or even of error in 
 calculation is the sign for a perfect eruption of righteous 
 wrath. Outraged virtue at the Adelphi may bottle up 
 
 C 2 
 
36 THE INNER MAN. 
 
 its woes and take a back-seat when the Sock-cad is " on 
 the job " of vindicating his tarnished honour. His 
 language is not pretty, but it flows freely. He will appeal 
 to the Head Master and the Provist who have known 
 him for an honest man from his cradle ; he himself has 
 known Eton gen'l'men, man and boy for forty year, and 
 he never knowed one deserving the name that would ha' 
 said such a thing, never. He doesn't care for your dirty 
 money, but he ain't going to be put upon. Will you 
 fight ? Ah ! then pay up like a gen'l'm'n. Thankee, 
 sir. Exit, spitting on the coin. Ugh ! 
 
 The Sock-cad can afford to be extortionate, because he 
 does not require to keep his old customers. u The bitten 
 tyke shuns the byke ;" but time will provide a fresh 
 crop of Lower Boys, who will spend half their time at 
 Cuckoo or Upper Hope, ever ready with appetites tuned 
 up to ravening pitch by the chill of the water for pulpy 
 orange and puffy varnished bun; whole hecatombs of 
 victims, to fill the voracious maw of his greasy little 
 notebook with interminable " ticks." 
 
 Occasionally there come into the Sock cad's clientele 
 young sinners made of sterner stuff, whom experience or 
 intuition forbids him to trust. With these he has another 
 and a more excellent way. He sinks for the nonce his 
 function as Popular Restaurant at Parisian Prices, and 
 becomes an Itinerant Pawnshop. When you see a small 
 boy shamefacedly making his way to the river in trousers 
 of appalling dimensions or with abnormally distended 
 pockets, you may know that the trousers are double ; 
 only one pair will ever see the bureau-drawers again ; or 
 that the pockets are stuffed with candles and packets of 
 
THE INNER MAN. 37 
 
 tea and sugar, all to be converted into sock by the dirty 
 unshaven magician in the broken hat and the frayed 
 check suit. In this way we have known a Waterbury 
 watch in good working order bartered for a couple of 
 baskets of strawberries, (you must know that nowadays a 
 Waterbury watch invariably accompanies the godmotherly 
 gift of a gold repeater. " This will do for ordinary wear, 
 Charlie, the other for grand occasions "). We have 
 heard of an embroidered satin handkerchief sachet bazaar- 
 bought, one hopes, not home-wrought fetching as much 
 as six damp biscuits. A live squirrel " somewhat stained 
 and worn, but otherwise in good condition " is valued 
 at half a pound of cherries ; and we certainly remember 
 seeing one of these gentry dole out a meagre handful of 
 bananas with the remark that they were going dirt-cheap, 
 in exchange for a very pretty pair of gold sleeve-links. 
 After this who shall say that the Itinerant Pawnshop is 
 not a great institution ? 
 
 Further, the Sock-cad is a consummate actor. While 
 ready money lasts, he grins like a dog and is the incarna- 
 tion of obsequious servility. He beleaguers the unwary 
 with a siege-train of courtesy-titles, unsuspected before 
 and ranging from u Your Honour" on a grilling u after 
 4 " when blandishments are thrown away on his more or 
 less towel-clad customers, to " My Lord " in the cool of 
 the evening when trade is dull. 
 
 But a month later when your tick is " swelling wisibly " 
 and has been carried forward to the opposite page, he 
 assumes an air of fatherly generosity the manner of one 
 who is making a great personal sacrifice to save your 
 comparatively worthless carcase from starvation. " I tell 
 
38 THE INNER MAN. 
 
 yer straight, I dew, as I didn't oughter. But to 'blige a 
 gen'l'm'n there, Sir, yer kin 'ave yer b'nana, and I 
 throws in a biscuit, only 'opin to get paid. She's mortial 
 bad, Sir, is my little gell, mortial bad." We never yet 
 knew a Sock-cad and the ages of the tribe vary between 
 13 and 105, who had not got " a little gell at home 
 mortial bad." She is part of the Stock-in-trade. An 
 unmistakable test. Beware of cheap and tawdry imitations. 
 
 We have spoken strongly about this pest, but we would 
 not have it thought that in so doing we condemn the 
 whole race of Itinerant Vendors. We gladly admit that 
 there are several honest fellows, who sell good fruit at fair 
 prices, whom every Etonian knows and trusts. They are 
 benefactors of the human race, " too good for such a 
 name " as the opprobrious Sock-cad, and for them we have 
 nothing but praise. But the creatures whom we have 
 denounced are loathsome harpies, preying on the ignorance 
 and simplicity and the purses of silly small boys ; 
 their character cannot be too widely known. For as 
 things now stand, the Sock-cad pursues his evil path 
 exulting, winked at by the authorities, tolerated or 
 encouraged by the watermen ; sometimes O red-letter 
 day ! put into the river by a more than usually public- 
 spirited Wet-bob. The water is temporarily discoloured, 
 but the moral effect is suprising. Then and then only is 
 the Sock-cad less black than we have painted him. 
 
 Of the derivation of the word Sock we have said nothing, 
 because like all good slang it has no derivation. 
 
 We have said little of sock-shops. There is not much 
 to be said. They are like good unpretending restaurants 
 anywhere else, only more so. Eton, we firmly believe, is 
 
THE INNER MAN. 39 
 
 the only place on earth where for a shilling we can 
 get a hot breakfast in a paper-bag, hot and juicy and 
 garnished with potato. At the back of one of these 
 places is the " Witches' Cave," whence come the hot 
 breakfasts of half Eton : that mysterious little room 
 framing like a shrine the vicious bloated stove with its 
 armoury of dishes and trays and saucepans and grills, 
 hung and slung and hooked on hooks and chained to 
 chains and heaped on hobs, and wedged into brackets and 
 corners and spouts, all fragrant and hissing, capable of 
 providing you in two minutes with any honest English 
 dish under the sun that you like to ask for. The shrine 
 is dense with priestesses, plump smiling matrons in white 
 caps and aprons, and plumper boys we fancy the boys get 
 everything that is left over ; but they do not sleep at 
 their work, like their Pickwickian prototype the 
 priestesses see to that. There is a characteristic air of 
 jollity about it all, and it has been our custom to take 
 American visitors there to show them what a British 
 breakfast means. 
 
 Or we might describe to you the Italian nobleman 
 (so we understand) now, owing to reduced circumstances 
 and reverses of fortune, keeping the neatest of shops, 
 where you can get better chocolat and cafe-au-lait than 
 anywhere this side of Paris. He has the blase cynical 
 air of one who has lived long in courts and mixed 
 with kings and courtiers ; his unvarying retort is 
 " You're anozzer, " and off this impenetrable armour 
 every kind of chaff falls harmlessly, except one. What 
 that is we know but may not say ; but it means death, 
 unless he who uttered the insult can dodge round the 
 
40 THE INNER MAN. 
 
 marble tables and get through the door in time. An 
 Italian, be he count or confectioner, never forgives, never 
 forgets. The offender may grow a beard, he may double 
 the circumference of his waistcoat, he may disguise himself 
 as a policeman or a Hindu valet or a Cabinet Minister ; 
 but if ever he comes near that shop again, black fate is 
 waiting for him behind the counter. 
 
 There is not much to relieve the monotony of life in a 
 sock-shop. We are inclined to think that to stand all 
 day watching Lower Boys eat must be the nearest approach 
 to Purgatory that this earth can offer. We do not know 
 whether the keepers of sock-shops frequently make away 
 with their dull but lucrative lives : anyhow, Barnes-pool 
 is within an easy walk. Sometimes the attendant nymph 
 boxes a small boy's ears ; then there is a row. Once we 
 remember seeing a bull force its way into one of these 
 establishments ; the fact that the sagacious creature should 
 have chosen so near an approach to a china-shop is an 
 astonishing proof of the downward spread of education. 
 Of course there was an excited crowd and breakings of 
 
 plates and " swoundings " of damsels and but that is 
 
 malicious gossip. At any rate that day and its exciting 
 incidents must have been quite a cheering oasis in the 
 desert of ordinary feeding-days. However the profits are 
 enormous ; some of these places must handle from one to 
 three thousand pounds in the year : and that in ready 
 money and at their own prices. 
 
 And this seems to be an appropriate occasion for remark- 
 ing that with the profits of this book we propose to set up a 
 House of Refection in the Eton High Street for the sale 
 of fruit, ices, hot breakfasts, etc., at strictly exorbitant 
 
THE INNER MAN. 41 
 
 charges, and we trust by continued punctuality and strict 
 attention to business to merit the favor of your esteemed 
 patronage. 
 
 In a few years we shall make our fortunes. We shall sell 
 the goodwill of the business to a syndicate of American 
 speculators, and squander our odd coppers on deer-forests, 
 yachts, orchid-houses, and portraits of our ancestors at 15 
 guineas the yard. 
 
CROCODILE. 
 
 " Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens" VlRGIL. 
 
 " ' Savage, eh ? ' ' Well, no ; I don't know as I should call him 
 savage exactly. Sorter nibblish, though, he may be. Has a kinder 
 habit of gnawing things up, so to speak.' " OUR FAMILY VAULT. 
 
 HE was a Dog, my tutor's Dog tutor with a small t, 
 Dog with an unusually big D. 
 
 His real name was Antoninus Pius, cumbrous and 
 classical and inappropriate. Even my tutor, who con- 
 ferred it on him after whole weeks of solemn deliberation, 
 has been heard to admit that the Pius part was a mis- 
 nomer. My tutor's wife regarded the creature with 
 affection and called him Tony. In the house we cursed 
 him (we seldom alluded to him for any other purpose) as 
 
 "the cur," or " that mongrel," filling up 
 
 the parenthesis with such decorative epithets as a refined 
 but vigorous fancy and the needs of the moment might 
 suggest. 
 
 And to the school at large he was known simply as the 
 Crocodile. 
 
 What was he like ? The question is more easily asked 
 than answered. Perhaps Peter Frank the flunkey came 
 nearest to the truth in his celebrated apophthegm touch- 
 ing Antoninus Pius. It was one morning when that 
 intelligent monster had overturned a lamp in Witstock's 
 room, drunk about a quart of paraffin off the carpet, and 
 then been horribly sick in the servants' hall. Peter 
 
CROCODILE. 
 
 43 
 
 Frank took his seat on the dresser, stuck his thumbs in 
 the arm-holes of his livery waistcoat, and addressed 
 Bucklebury's Shiny Fag in these memorable words ; 
 " Blow me, if he aint more like a devil-fish than a Chris- 
 tian dog ! " 
 
 Which words the Shiny Fag retailed, as was his wont 
 whenever Peter Frank delivered himself of an apophthegm, 
 to the B. B. Club at tea time. 
 
 The Crocodile's mistress, dear innocent soul, confidently 
 believed him to be a beautiful dog. She would have it 
 that he was a Bloodhound, and used to say that if other 
 Bloodhounds were unlike Tony, why, you know, it only 
 showed what an entirely superior sort of Bloodhound 
 Tony must be, you know. And she had his pedigree, 
 framed. Which arguments were incontrovertible. 
 
 What was he like? Well, description pales her in- 
 effectual fires ; the torch of Clio, (if she has one,) flickers 
 and goes out. Try to imagine the most hopelessly ugly 
 and radically sinful of all imitations of dogs that ever 
 have been. Add that his colour was a bright yellow, 
 patched and streaked with dirty black, like a bit of orange 
 peel that has lain many days in the gutter, or a buckle- 
 soiled buff belt, or an old and faded wasp. When you 
 have realised the full effect of that, brace yourself up to 
 hear the rest. His head was a mastiff's head, with a 
 square, sulky sort of forehead, and a big jaw, very broad 
 at the base. But near the nostrils dame Nature would 
 seem to have changed her mind, and revived a greyhound 
 strain about which the pedigree was curiously silent, and 
 the mastiff's head ended in a long tapering muzzle. 
 Underneath, except where his big red tongue everlastingly 
 
44 CROCODILE. 
 
 dangled from the corner of his mouth, you might see the 
 big white tusks that had earned him the title of Crocodile, 
 and more than hinted of wolf blood somewhere round 
 the corner. He had no neck, and his body was a size too 
 small for his head, with forelegs that must have been 
 made to measure for a dachshund and been rejected as a 
 misfit, coarse, bandy, and low : hindquarters in which the 
 greyhound characteristics cropped up again : and a fifteen 
 inch rat tail, round which he had a trick of twisting one 
 or both of his supple hind legs. In short, the very 
 Crocodile of a Dog. 
 
 Antoninus Pius was ugly, but he was not like the new 
 type of Lady Novelist's hero, who with all his ugliness 
 combines nobility and beauty of soul ; rather he was an 
 unmitigated reprobate, and vicious withal. His looks 
 were angelic by comparison with his little black heart. 
 
 He had a pleasing habit of lying in a dark corner of the 
 stairs, half asleep. Your foot lit on something soft and yet 
 hard, like a spring mattress, and before you could say 
 knife, the Crocodile's teeth clicked in your trousers. Then 
 you would kick him down stairs, where he used to wallow 
 for a time using the most horrible language and then re- 
 turn to bivouac on his favourite step. 
 
 You shall hear how he came to live on the stairs. It 
 began with his banishment from my tutor's part of the 
 house. That mild and magnificent scholar had paid ^"5 
 for a Pedigree Bloodhound and never forgave him for 
 turning out a Crocodile. Of course my tutor's wife loved 
 him and he loved her : 
 
 " They loved with a love that was more than love 
 She and her Antony P." 
 
CROCODILE. 
 
 45 
 
 as the Shiny Fag remarked after a course of Edgar Allan 
 Poe, but she loved her children's small pink calves still 
 better ; and things had occurred which unsettled her faith 
 in Tony. She had Doubts. And the Argument from 
 Design, as applied to Tony's mixed style of Architecture, 
 was worse than useless. 
 
 So they ordered that for the future Antoninus Pius 
 should pitch his tent in the pantry. The butler said " Yes 
 'M," closed the door softly, set down the coal scuttle out- 
 side, and swore. He was a sandy-haired and sentimental 
 man ; and he loved a dark tressed damsel of some forty 
 summers, with whom he made pilgrimages along the 
 towing path on Sunday evenings, taking the measure of 
 her waist the while. 
 
 Like many sentimental bachelors he kept a cat a 
 harmless, devotional-looking, weak-eyed, tortoiseshell cat. 
 
 Now Antoninus Pius had one virtue, and its legal name 
 is Felicide. He was a very Cossack among the cats, and 
 made my tutor's peaceful garden the scene of Bulgarian 
 atrocities fit to bleach the hair of any maiden lady who 
 reads this history. The cats never held Musical Conver- 
 saziones on the roof of my tutor's boot shed after the 
 Crocodile's installation on the premises : though from 
 other gardens we used to hear their songs borne on the 
 midnight breeze to an accompaniment of muffled oaths 
 and a rattle of soap dishes and flower pots on distant 
 slates. Still, stray cats used to come for picnic parties, 
 and few of them ever went home again. Peter Frank and 
 the other flunkey used to gather together the corpses of 
 the slain, early in the morning, before my tutor's people 
 were up. They sold them cheap to a man who kept 
 
46 CROCODILE. 
 
 ferrets up town. There is nothing like raw cat for ferrets. 
 And, I believe, he used the fur for tiger skin rugs. 
 
 How the butler came to overlook this Felicidal propen- 
 sity of the Crocodile's, I cannot imagine. Perhaps he 
 was thinking of the dark tressed damsel and forgot the 
 tortoise-shell Deaconess. At any rate he whistled twice 
 or thrice, stooped down and slapped his thigh in an 
 inanely enticing manner, and said, u Come along 'ere, 
 there's a good dog." And Antoninus followed to the 
 pantry-door, tremulous by reason of the rich smell of cat. 
 The tortoise-shell Deaconess was purring before the fire ; 
 she heard a growl, she saw the Destroyer advancing at a 
 hand-gallop, and she made a leap for the open window. 
 I have said that the Crocodile had the hindquarters of a 
 greyhound, and he leaped too, and having the advantage 
 of space for his spring he came through the air with the 
 rush of a rocket, and caught her beyond the sill midway 
 between earth and heaven ; and then in the words of 
 Witstock " there was blue ruin and black hatbands." 
 
 This butler was the baldest of men, and parsimonious 
 policy forbade him to tear his scanty hair. But he buried 
 the Deaconess decently in a corner of the garden ; whence 
 her remains were disinterred the same day by Peter 
 Frank, who sold them to the ferret-man at an exorbitant 
 rate because tortoiseshell fur lends itself well to the 
 manufacture of tiger-skin. Then he bought another cat, 
 a trifle less weak-eyed but more devotional-looking than 
 the first, and drove Antoninus Pius forth with contumely 
 and kicks. 
 
 Now my tutor's cook was jealous of the dark-tressed 
 damsel, and cherished a grudge against the butler. So 
 
CROCODILE. 
 
 47 
 
 she rejoiced at the martyrdom of the Deaconess, and 
 welcomed the Crocodile to her kitchen, where he fared 
 sumptuously every day, until it came into his head to 
 test by experiment the advantages of the human calf as 
 an article of canine diet, and selected for that purpose 
 the cook's young man (Baker's Assistant, vice Butler 
 cashiered). 
 
 The cook used to tell the story in stirring language to 
 Peter Frank, and it filtered through the usual channel the 
 Shiny Fag until it reached Bucklebury and me. 
 
 " She was talkin' to 'er friend," said Peter Frank, 
 "just as you and me might be doin' 'ere, and she 'ears a 
 buzzin' noise in the corner, and cook she think no more 
 till she see that (epithet) Crockydile a-settlin' on 'er 
 friend's leg for all the world like a bluebottle on a 'am ! 
 And / 'ear the noise and I comes runnin' in, and find 
 cook a-leatherin' of 'im with the roll in' pin, and I says 
 * that ain't no good/ I says, ' that ain't no more good 
 than a lame flea. Get the pepper-box,' I says, and we 
 sprinkles a 'andful of pepper on 'is nose, and presently 'e 
 begins sneezin' like mad, and let go and slink away 
 a-swallerin ' of the piece, ' ' 
 
 u Just fancy, if it had been one of the children ! '' said 
 Mrs. Tutor, and when next she met the Crocodile she 
 took him by the ear and said in cruel tones, " O you 
 naughty dog, O you atrociously wicked little dog O for 
 shame ! " and then patted him lest the severity of the 
 chastisement should have hurt his feelings. 
 
 But she did not offer to take him back into the 
 drawing-room, and the butler did not offer to take him 
 back into the pantry, and the cook said she didn't want 
 
48 CROCODILE. 
 
 to see no more of the nasty spiteful thing ; so Antoninus 
 Pius became an outcast and a wanderer on the face of the 
 earth, and lived principally on the stairs, as I said before, 
 and in the passages, and when winter came round he took 
 refuge on the hearth rug or in the arm-chair of any boy's 
 room that he could get into ; and he was almost as good 
 at bursting doors as any Magdalen man, which is saying 
 a good deal. 
 
 At first we pitied him, as more sinned against than 
 sinning ; he had been expelled from the drawing-room 
 and the muffins and cushions thereof for not being a 
 Bloodhound of good family which was not his fault : 
 and for looking hungrily at the children's calves which, 
 as they were fine well-developed members, was only 
 natural. Then he had made rissoles of the butler's cat 
 but that only proved his sporting instinct ; and if he had 
 mutilated the cook's follower, why, as Mrs. Tutor said, 
 the follower had no business to be there. 
 
 So we pitied him, and Lower Boys (who love Dog in 
 any form however hideous) used to bring little propitiatory 
 offerings of biscuits and Brazil nuts and aged sardines : 
 which he accepted without gratitude (as lawful tribute) 
 and swallowed without mastication, and snarled the more. 
 Sometimes he bit people, and then we said, u Oh, he must 
 have been bullying the dog," and the whole' house looked 
 askance at the poor limping victim and made it plain to 
 him that he must be a very monster of barbarity, steeped 
 to the lips in crime ; else why should the Crocodile have 
 bitten him ? And we never discovered what a viper we 
 had cherished in our bosoms till that memorable evening 
 in December when Bucklebury asked an old Etonian, 
 

 CROCODILE. 49 
 
 one Mondragon, who had been Keeper of the Field and a 
 very considerable swell in his day, to come in to tea with 
 the B. B. Club. They came to Buck's room and found it 
 dark, except for a half and half sort of fire. " Sit down 
 won't you ? " said Buck hospitably, " while I light the 
 candles. That's a good pew," and he pointed to his big 
 basket chair. Mondragon hitched up his trousers, like 
 the carefully-dressed man that he was, divided his coat- 
 tails, and never noticed a black and yellow object lying 
 in the very centre of the seat, or, if he did, he must have 
 taken it in the flickering firelight for one of those fancy- 
 work pillow-affairs that fellow's sisters delight in making 
 for them. With ponderous expectation of luxurious 
 cushions he threw himself back into the chair when lo ! 
 there was a crunching of bones beneath him, a muffled 
 sound that was at once a gasp, a grunt, and a growl, and 
 a set of sharp teeth came cutting their way through his 
 trousers into^his skin below. Up he leapt, yelling like a 
 milkman, just as the Shiny Fag appeared in the doorway 
 with four slices of toast and a toasting-fork in his hand. 
 
 The Shiny Fag took in the situation at a glance. He 
 flung the four pieces of toast to the four winds of heaven ; 
 he grasped the toasting-fork " at the point of balance,'' 
 raised the battle-cry of his race, and rushed upon the 
 unseen foe. The weapon gleamed for an instant in the 
 firelight, and descended with unerring aim into the depths 
 of the basket-chair. There followed a heart-rending yell, 
 and Mondragon found himself free. Now the voice that 
 yelled was the voice of Antoninus Pius. 
 
 At last Buck got the candles lighted, and this is what 
 
 they revealed : Mondragon stamping about the hearth- 
 
 D 
 
So CROCODILE. . 
 
 rug, feeling the injured part of his person, and adjusting 
 his rent garments ; but, happily for ears polite, speechless 
 with rage : the Shiny Fag, flushed and triumphant, 
 standing in a dramatic attitude, pointing to the chair ; 
 while in the chair was the Crocodile himself, a trifle 
 bulged and bent out of shape, writhing and struggling to 
 get upon his feet. 
 
 " You did it on purpose," roared Mondragon when he 
 found his voice. Apologies and explanations were vain, 
 and he tramped out of the room with his trousers and 
 coat-tails (and they had been remarkably nice clothes 
 when he entered the room) all in shreds and tatters. We, 
 (for by this time I had joined them,) we sent the Shiny 
 Fag after him with his hat and ulster, and renewed 
 apologies ; and by the time he reached the street his 
 wrath had so far cooled that he shouted up for his stick. 
 We dropped it from the window with a rattle upon the 
 pavement, just missing by about an inch the nose of a 
 Private of the Guards, who had probably burned his 
 fingers over the hot-penny-tied-to-a-string-and-trailed-on- 
 the-pavement trick a few minutes before, and seemed to 
 think we had tried to slay him of malice prepense ; he 
 took up his post on the other side of the street and blas- 
 phemed without intermission for forty minutes by a stop 
 watch ; at the end of which time three of the College 
 policemen assembled and ran him in as drunk and dis- 
 orderly. Meanwhile Mondragon calmly picked up his 
 stick, and shouted, " Will you promise to kill that dog ? 
 If you don't I'll bring an action." Buck promised, and 
 the Knight of the Rent Raiment departed in peace. 
 Then we turned to the Crocodile, who was still writhing 
 
CROCODILE. 51 
 
 as much as (and howling rather more than) before. The 
 Shiny Fag's trident had pinned his rat-tail to the cushions 
 as neatly as ever Tweedside poacher speared an eel, and 
 still more wonderful without wounding it. A prong had 
 nipped it either side and held it fast. We released him, 
 kicked him out, and held a Council of War a sort of 
 Committee of Ways and Means. For every one of us had 
 made up his mind that after the events of that night, by 
 fair means or foul, the Crocodile must die. 
 
 In gloomy silence we sat and ate the tea that we had 
 prepared for the great Mondragon ; or rather we sat and 
 Witstock ate. (I should perhaps have explained that at 
 the end of the summer, when my tutor's house broke up, 
 I transferred myself to Buck's tutor's sheltering roof, and 
 was elected a member of the Club. I held the purely 
 honorary office of Chucker-out.) After tea we adjourned 
 to Ixworth's room, cleared the decks for action by sweep- 
 ing books and clothes and other rubbish miscellaneously 
 off tables and chairs into all sorts of dusty corners, for 
 if ever there was an untidy ruffian who hung up his 
 pictures on the floor, and kept squadrons of boots on his 
 bureau, it was Ixworth and resolved ourselves into a 
 Committee of Ways and Means. A box of chocolates 
 was brought out by way of pacifying the Vice, and with 
 one accord we thrust back the tails of our blazers, raised 
 our heels to the mantel-piece or the table, and chewed 
 the cud of conspiracy. The President opened the pro- 
 ceedings in a memorable speech, buried in an arm-chair 
 the while, whence he marked the cadence of his sentences 
 with a knotted cane, and only roused himself to an up- 
 right position for the fiery peroration, in which he called 
 
 D 2 
 
52 CROCODILE. 
 
 on his hearers as fellow-Englishmen and fellow-Etonians 
 to rise in their thousands (there were exactly three of us 
 in the room beside himself, and a problematical boys' 
 maid listening at the keyhole) and vow eternal vengeance 
 against this Eleventh Plague of Egypt. (This was under- 
 stood primarily as a reference to the fact that crocodiles 
 are supposed to come from Egypt, but also as a proof 
 that Buck had been getting up Divinity for the Newcastle). 
 It was not, he said, only the physical and mental suffering 
 or even the tailor's bill of the club's guest ; it was not 
 only the slur that had been cast on the Club's hospitality; 
 it was not only the desecration of the Club's favourite 
 chair ; no ! it was the shocking and appalling insecurity 
 of life in the very heart of a civilized land, in the very 
 bowels of an Eton house, that that that ." 
 
 " Yes, yes, old chap, we understand. Thump heavy on 
 the big drum. Three cheers for the British Constitution ! ' ' 
 shouted Witstock. " And the Bench of Bishops ! " 
 chanted Ixworth in antistrophe. " And the B. B. Club ! " 
 roared Witstock back. " It's the only way of turning off 
 the gas," he whispered to me, as the President finding it 
 hopeless to proceed began to prey upon the chocolates. 
 " Three more cheers for Buck ! Hurrah ! Come in." 
 
 This last was in answer to a knock, and there entered 
 very diffidently the head of a maid with a message from 
 the matron. "Miss Endor would like to know, sir, 
 whether Mr. Witstock has got a fit of the highstrikes, 
 sir ; which the patient should be laid on a waterproof 
 sheet on the floor, and cold dowshes applied, sir." 
 
 " No, it's not that, Mrs. Leghorn," said Buck gravely. 
 " Tell Miss Endor it's only the new brand of tea she gave 
 
CROCODILE. 53 
 
 out last week. It really isn't safe. It's gone to Mr. 
 Witstock's head." 
 
 " It's so violently and dangerously strong," added 
 Witstock with bitter sarcasm. " Takes six spoonfuls to 
 make a brew the colour of Weston's Yard. Oh ! it's a 
 muscular tea altogether. Samson ain't in it beside that 
 tea." 
 
 " Very well, sir. I'll tell Miss Endor, sir," said the 
 maid. She was a tall and angular dame of obsequious 
 demeanour, (and when she dropped an elaborate curtsey, 
 as she did on an average two hundred times in the day, 
 the wonder was that she did not snap off in the midst, 
 being dry and brittle to the eye, but tender and motherly 
 at heart), and with the instinct of her race adored the 
 chief rulers of the house and hated the matron, who hated 
 her. 
 
 The net result of our deliberations was that the Presi- 
 dent and the Vice were made commissioners with 
 plenipotentiary powers, to compass the " removal " of 
 the Crocodile, in such a way as to divert all suspicion 
 from the Club, and to give the least possible pain to 
 Mrs. Tutor. They were to conspire together during the 
 holidays and to report to us at the beginning of the 
 Easter Half ; they were to lay a plot and we would hatch 
 it. A sporting groom, who had certainly taken an interest 
 in cock lighting and was supposed to have dabbled in 
 crime, recommended them to take " counsel's opinion" 
 from a fancier in Shoreditch, who as he more than 
 hinted made a specialitd of dog-stealing, enjoyed an 
 extensive practice, and was up to all the tricks of the 
 trade. They found this man of many wiles ; they loosed 
 
54 CROCODILE. 
 
 his tongue with a drink and a gift, and told their simple 
 tale a vicious cur, a tender-hearted dame, and a conspiracy 
 of high-minded sportsmen. The dog-fancier passed a 
 short forefinger over the bristles on his chin, and they 
 sang to his touch like the catgut of a fiddle ; so 
 Witstock said. Then he spoke : 
 
 " 'E moight be kidnept. But kidneppin' a sevvidge 
 dawg is loike shavin' with a 'andsaw makes 'oles in yer 
 skin without woitin' to be arsked, and aint no manner of 
 use arterwards. Wy don ? t yer poison 'im ? " 
 
 They said that were they quite ready to poison him, if 
 they could be sure that the poison would never be sus- 
 pected ; whereupon their host declared that he knowed 
 a cove as 'ad the stuff as'ld turn up that dog in a peaceful 
 and gentlemanlike manner ; no blooming pain, and never 
 a trace, not if you was to analyse for a month with a 
 tellingscope ; and more drinks and more gifts elicited an 
 address an address in the wilds of Whitechapel. 
 
 The President and the Vice thought this sounded very 
 promising. They resolved to do the thing well. They 
 disguised themselves in what they believed to be slum- 
 ming costume old shooting-coats, grey flannel trousers, 
 and u bowler " hats, tied red and yellow handkerchiefs 
 round their necks, left their watches at home, and thus 
 attired slunk in dread of recognition into a hansom, 
 whose driver insisted on being paid beforehand by such 
 shady travellers, and at last reached the place they sought. 
 It was a dingy little chemist's shop, bearing the name of 
 Aaron Schenck : half the bottles empty, the handles 
 broken off the drawers, the labels peeling off the cases, 
 and no sign of customers. Yet there was evidence of 
 
CROCODILE. 
 
 55 
 
 prosperity in a little back room of which some part could 
 be seen ; Buck had a theory that a man's character may 
 be judged by what he reads, and here was a pair of gold- 
 rimmed eyeglasses reposing on an open copy of the 
 Christian World. The chemist himself was a German 
 Jew, with a rusty black coat, a soft sad voice, and white 
 hair that curled most beautifully about his ample chin 
 and forehead, and somehow gave him the look of an 
 ultra-devout Dissenter. 
 
 Buck like Mercurius was the chief speaker. " Look 
 here," he said, "we want some poison." At the word 
 poison the old gentleman's expression changed ; hitherto 
 expecting only the sale of a toothbrush (if that might be 
 in these parts) or a sheet of sticking-plaster for a broken 
 head, he had blinked benevolently lil^e an ordinary mem- 
 ber of the congregation waiting for the service to begin. 
 Now he grew agitated, pursed up his lips, and unbuttoned 
 his lower waistcoat-button like a prominent elder about 
 to offer that extempore prayer for rain which he has 
 been rehearsing at home throughout the winter. He 
 stooped over the counter and whispered, 
 
 " Von at a time, von at a time j " then led Buck into 
 the next room, chuckled horribly, and offered him wine. 
 "Is it your forst graime ? " he asked. 
 
 Buck was puzzled and angry. " Not a crime at all. I 
 want some stuff to kill a dog. And I'm in a hurry." 
 
 " Ach ! you are not the forst that has named to me a 
 dog. Zomtimes rats. Zomtimes cats. I haf known a 
 guardian galled a gow. Bot you will find it best to be 
 frank. Your dog, he has two legs ? Nicht so ? " 
 
 The old gentleman winked horribly. 
 
56 CROCODILE. 
 
 " Four," said Buck, still in the dark. " Four exactly." 
 
 The Jew winked more horribly than ever. 
 
 " So ! you are too gunning. Bot be frank. Who is 
 he ? Your guardian, perhaps ? or your vife but no, you 
 are too yong for a vife or your fazzer ? O yong man, 
 can it be your fazzer ? " 
 
 Buck was disposed to retort that in another minute it 
 would be the Jew himself ; but he contained himself and 
 repeated that he wanted to poison a dog. Aaron Schenck 
 shook his head, and seemed hurt at the " yong shentle- 
 man's " lack of confidence. He unlocked a safe and 
 produced a neat japanned tea-caddy ; unlocking this in 
 turn he revealed a series of partitions full of packets wrapped 
 in different papers. They were labelled Purifying Powder. 
 
 u I show this not to all," explained the Jew. " My own 
 dishgovery Purifying Powders and when at the ingwest 
 they cut up the corrpse, there is no more sign than of an 
 ordinary vegetable pill. Hosh ! " as Buck began to 
 remonstrate, " I vill be silent as the grave. Bot O yong 
 man, be gareful. Look to the vill before. I haf known 
 disappointments and grief at the funeral, all for vant of a 
 leetle gare." 
 
 He spoke as if he had experienced some such 
 disappointment himself. Buck was really angry. 
 
 " I tell you," he shouted, " I don't want your cursed 
 stuff for anything but a dog." 
 
 Crash ! Witstock kicked the door open. " Buck, old 
 fellow, I thought you were fighting. Couldn't stand it 
 any longer." 
 
 "Well," said Buck. " The atmosphere was getting 
 thickish. Had enough of this." 
 
CROCODILE. 57 
 
 They dropped half-a-sovereign upon the Christian 
 World, to pay for the broken lock, and went out arm in 
 arm. 
 
 " Old fiend thought I wanted to do for my governor," 
 said Buck when they reached the street. " No more 
 fooling around with poison for me." 
 
 Back again at Eton, playing fives, running with the 
 Beagles, and plotting against the Crocodile with all the 
 ingenuity that downright hatred, and a constant fear of 
 his ambushes in dark corners, and, in more than one case, 
 the sight of a scar on one's leg, could give birth to. To 
 describe all the plans we made, the devices we tried, the 
 hopes we conceived, and the failures we underwent, 
 would fill the Record Office and the British Museum and 
 leave some odd volumes over for the Bodleian. The 
 Shiny Fag burned with excitement, and entered very 
 thoroughly into the spirit of the plotting mania which 
 began to spread through the house ; he talked of 
 marvellous root-poisons at "his place," which his people 
 could get. But as "his place" was in the South Seas 
 there were difficulties in the way ; and Buck remembered 
 Aaron Schenck, and would not countenance Poison. 
 
 Ixworth had a great idea of getting the Muzzling Order 
 extended to Buckinghamshire, being confident that the 
 wearing of a muzzle would soon goad the Crocodile to 
 such a pitch of frenzy that we should be justified in 
 shooting him as a mad dog : for he hated a muzzle very 
 nearly as fervently as he hated cats. " And if we did get 
 bitten," said Ixworth, " why, it would be a good excuse 
 for a trip to Paris." He went so far as to write about it 
 to his uncle, who was a magistrate near Wycombe and a 
 
 O* THH 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
58 CROCODILE. 
 
 great man on the County Council. But his uncle must 
 have been suffering from the gout, for he wrote back that 
 the Muzzling Order was perdition in disguise, and did 
 his nephew take him for a fool ? 
 
 After that Witstock hit on the plan of getting him 
 killed quite casually and accidentally in a rough-and- 
 tumble with some strange dog. For weeks the Shiny 
 Fag made it his business to wander up and down the 
 streets, through by-lanes and backyards and alleys, with 
 a lump of highly flavoured meat in his hand, and hardly 
 a day passed without his smuggling upstairs some 
 ferocious-looking monster to do battle with Antoninus 
 Pius. He got quite skilful, and used to seduce all 
 manner of dogs from Eton and Windsor and even from 
 Slough, first making friends by strewing bits of bone and 
 bread before them, and then letting them sniff the wafted 
 fragance of the chunk of primeval ham which he carried 
 about in a paper-bag. Peter Frank had previously been 
 bribed to keep the Crocodile dinnerless ; so when we led 
 the two dogs to the passage remotest from my tutor's 
 rooms, and set down a literal bone of contention between 
 them, they generally flew throat to throat like a pair of 
 Lower-boys who have been kicking each other under the 
 desk for two hours in musty pupil-room and then meet 
 face to face on the stairs. We found that masters' dogs 
 fought better, having a professional antipathy to the 
 Crocodile ; but they could only be introduced with 
 caution, being as contraband as cigarettes, because any 
 one currying favour with his master's dog is suspected of 
 wishing to introduce the beast surreptitiously into- school. 
 Perhaps our hopes soared highest when we beguiled a large 
 
CROCODILE. 59 
 
 and very celebrated St. Bernard into my tutor's coal 
 house, choosing a day when his master was from home, 
 and kept him there hungry till the evening. We profited 
 nothing by the risk we ran ; for being an aristocratic and 
 high-souled hound he cast one searching glance at 
 Antoninus Pius, whose manners certainly had not that 
 repose which marks the caste of Vere de Vere or even of a 
 Roman Emperor, and knew him for a base plebeian ; and 
 though he might have a chawed 'im up in two minutes 
 and then gone on to the 'am," as Peter Frank remarked, 
 he turned with majestic step and strode through the thick 
 of the crowd, and not one of us durst cross his path. 
 
 We only once contrived to bring off a real combat 
 a Voutrance, and that was cut short by the approach of 
 Mrs. Tutor. You probably know a strongly-built, hairy 
 cur that dwells up town, whom a year or two ago the 
 Beagles coming home from exercise put up near Barnes 
 Pool and hunted down the High Street to the post office, 
 where he went to earth in a coal-scuttle, and hounds were 
 whipped off. The Shiny Fag had long had his eye on 
 this beast, and one night he decoyed him into the maze 
 of passages which branch off my tutor's back-yard, and 
 introduced him in an insulting manner to the Crocodile's 
 notice. The stranger was a bit the smaller dog, but from 
 the first he meant business, and made up for want of 
 stature by pluck and science ; he never wasted breath in 
 growls or time in skirmishing, that shaggy little imp, but 
 went in with a rush and gripped Antoninus by the loose 
 baggy skin of the cheek above the jaw, and hung there 
 with quivering tail and eyes gleaming through locks of 
 matted hair, grim and resolute as the grasp of death. The 
 
60 CROCODILE. 
 
 Crocodile on the other hand was slow and bulky ; he had 
 teeth like the fangs of a man-trap, but knew no more of 
 the real method than a Black Country bruiser knows of 
 the Rules of the Ring. Still it was a beautiful fight, and 
 there really seemed to be some hope that the destroyer of 
 our calves, our lamps and our domestic peace would be 
 left dead on the pavement, when suddenly a scout came 
 flying with the news that Mrs. Tutor was descending in 
 the direction of the kitchen. In less than the twinkling 
 of an eye the Shiny Fag and Peter Frank had separated 
 the combatants, and the former with marvellous presence 
 of mind rolled up a heavy tub, and placed it upside down 
 on the top of the alien dog. When my tutor's wife 
 arrived she tound the Crocodile panting on the floor, with 
 the Shiny Fag and the footman looking on in attitudes 
 of respectful sympathy. 
 
 " Bloodhound seems ill, Ma'am," said the latter, 
 saluting. 
 
 " What can be the matter with him ? " and she stirred 
 him gently with her umbrella. The Crocodile snatched 
 it from her and tore the silk to shreds ; and Peter Frank 
 rescued the fragments with some difficulty and restored 
 them to his mistress, with the remark that the heat of the 
 weather (in March !) must have upset the " pore dawg's 
 internals" ; while that arrant young hypocrite, the Shiny 
 Fag, walked back with her and made himself so agreeable 
 that he was asked to enliven the discreet devotees of her 
 " Sabbath Tap " on the following Sunday afternoon. 
 And over the cake and bread-and-butter he told stories 
 of South Sea savages that made their hair stand on end 
 and took the starch out of their hymn-books. " Such 
 
CROCODILE. 6 1 
 
 narratives," said my tutor, " are eminently calculated to 
 encourage missionary enterprise." 
 
 So day by day the Crocodile's temper grew more 
 white-hot, and we hated him the more ; but Mrs. Tutor 
 continued to love him, and as everyone loved her, a ray 
 or two of reflected admiration sometimes fell upon her 
 ungrateful dog. We accused him in secret of the worst 
 crimes of drinking whisky, of reading Tit Bits, of 
 understanding the elements of Trigonometry. If the 
 authorities had ransacked anyone's ottoman and confiscated 
 the cigarettes that he had bought on Long Leave for use 
 during the holidays in Norway, the blame of the theft 
 was laid on Antoninus Pius. If anyone suspected that 
 his letters had been taken from their envelopes and read 
 as they lay on his mantel-piece, or found that his stamps 
 were melting away very rapidly, or that someone had 
 appropriated from his window-box the very flower that 
 he had reserved for his next Sunday's button-hole, all 
 sorts of nasty things were said about the Crocodile and 
 the natural depravity of Roman Emperors. The Crocodile 
 was a regular scapegoat, metaphorically speaking ; the 
 literal scapegoat has been improved away. Even lodging- 
 house keepers, who without a doubt are responsible 
 directly or indirectly for most of the crime that bubbles 
 up in this bad world, are content to bind the burden of 
 their transgressions on a lean specimen of the Common 
 Cat, kept about the premises for the purpose. It is 
 economical, and does no harm to the cat's constitution. 
 Again the House of Commons, which collectively includes 
 a greater number of potential criminals than any similar 
 body known to history or geography, the House of 
 
62 CROCODILE. 
 
 Commons itself is wont to lay the guilt of its iniquities 
 at the door of the constituencies ; just as the London 
 cabman, when you bade him drive to Paddington and he 
 lands you in the purlieus of Farringdon, is apt to make 
 his horse responsible for the mistake. In an ordinary 
 Eton house, when anything goes wrong, the Boy who 
 Chalks the Boots is usually hauled over the coals, 
 but we at my tutor's had attained a higher development 
 of civilization ; there the post of Universal Scapegoat was 
 worthily filled by Antoninus Pius, and unlike the Boy 
 who Chalks the Boots he deserved it every whit. 
 
 But a day of reckoning was at hand. 
 
 This is how it came. Buck's people took a place on 
 the river near Maidenhead, and one fine day in March 
 they drove some friends over to see Eton drove them as 
 an Irishman drives his reluctant agricultural produce to 
 market, for they did not in the least want to come ten 
 miles in a dog-cart with the chance of a wetting simply to 
 see a mere ordinary School ; and with them they brought a 
 young bull-terrier belonging to a brother of Buck's who 
 was now with his regiment in India. He was just emerg- 
 ing from puppyhood perhaps eighteen months old ; but 
 his dog-teeth were fine sound ivories, and his pluck was 
 the pluck of an intoxicated Gourkha ; I quote the words 
 of Captain Marmaduke Bucklebury, spoken on the P. 
 and O. steamer in the London Docks, when with tears 
 in his eyes he bade farewell to Sin (that was the dog's 
 name short for Sinbad), and emptied a bottle of cherry- 
 blossom scent over his wrinkled white shoulders, in order 
 that his fragrance might make a favourable impression 
 on the sister who had promised to take care of him. 
 
CROCODILE. 63 
 
 Well, Buck entertained his people most heroically, 
 marched them about the Playing-fields, told them stories 
 about all the places of interest, inventing quite recklessly 
 when the ordinary ones palled he shewed them the 
 identical tree on whose white bark the poet Gray used to 
 scribble verses in his own- blood, and the very chimney 
 which the Duke of Wellington climbed and sat on the 
 top of, when about to be flogged for putting cobbler's- wax 
 in the crown of the Head-master's Cap and finally he 
 gave them a lordly tea in his room, and made his father's 
 guests quite ashamed of having shrunk from a visit to 
 Eton. They drank his health in brimming bumpers of tea, 
 and nobody thought much of the bull-terrier Sinbad. But 
 when the time came for them to start back, there was a 
 hue-and-cry and loud calls of " Sin ! Sin ! " which must 
 have astonished the passers-by, and everybody shouted 
 and whistled, quite in vain. Sin was lost. Old Colonel 
 Bucklebury vowed that he wouldn't be made late for 
 dinner by a confounded dog ; the dog must have started 
 home ; and with that he lighted his cigar, whipped up 
 his horse, and vanished in a cloud of dust and small boys. 
 
 When we went upstairs we found Sin sitting, with a 
 self-satisfied smile curling about his lips, on Buck's 
 hearth-rug. The cunning beggar had hidden himself 
 until the other people had gone ; for with a want of taste 
 that it is difficult to understand he liked Buck better than 
 Buck's sister. lie had no respect for Buck's sister. Her 
 affection was wasted on him. Perhaps it was as well that 
 it should run to waste no longer. He was not a lady's 
 dog and that is high praise. 
 
 " What shall you do with him ? " we asked. 
 
64 CROCODILE, 
 
 " Keep him here till to-morrow. O you ripper ! and 
 then get a man to take him home. You jolly dog, you ! " 
 We flung verses and extra work to the winds, and spent 
 the evening in teaching the dog tricks, and when Prayer- 
 time came there was quite a little crowd of us in the 
 room admiring him. 
 
 Clang ! the clock struck. Bang ! shut my tutor's 
 door, there was a clatter of feet on stair and passage, and 
 with a parting injunction, "Lie still, Sin," Buck hurried 
 away to Prayers, and so did we. Who was last out of the 
 room ? Who ought to have shut the door and didn't ? 
 Buck said afterwards that it was Lidney ; Lidney declared 
 that it was Witstock ; Witstock handed the blame on to 
 me, and I thought that Ixworth was responsible ; Ixworth 
 believed that it was Kinnoul, if not Bucklebury himself. 
 But Mrs. Leghorn declares that door has always had a 
 trick of flying open unprovoked like off the sneck ; 
 whether it's draughts or whether it's sperritsshe wouldn't 
 like to say ; and the memory of man runneth not to the 
 contrary. 
 
 Be this as it may, my tutor was personally conducting 
 us at his customary snail's pace through the General 
 Confession, when the Crocodile's short, sharp, discontented 
 bark was heard in the passage above. It was answered 
 by a fusillade of hoarse yelps, which we recognised as the 
 bull-terrier's. 
 
 " Lucky there's a door between 'em," muttered Witstock 
 to his neighbour in the buzz of the Amen. 
 
 He was wrong. The barking sank into a duet of 
 growls, and then the crash of furniture and rattle of 
 falling fire-irons and an occasional howl showed that 
 
CROCODILE. 65 
 
 Antoninus Pius, the big yellow mongrel, and Sin, the 
 white bull-terrier, were fighting a duel to the death in 
 the little room overhead. Nothing is so infectious as 
 laughter at Prayers. A weak-minded Lower Boy failed 
 to choke down his chuckle ; presently half-a-dozen were 
 gurgling behind hands and handkerchiefs ; Ixworth's 
 face so much as I could see of it was growing purple, 
 and showed that he was bound to have his laugh out or 
 die, and soon almost all the shoulders in the room were 
 heaving convulsively. There were two exceptions. My 
 tutor never moved a muscle, though he turned a little red 
 about the gills, and increased his pace ; he took the next 
 three prayers at a gentle trot, and almost cantered through 
 the Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Men ; while 
 Buck knelt and strained his ears to follow the sounds 
 from the ceiling, with a look of agonized suspense that 
 sobered Ixworth, when he caught sight of it, like a dash 
 of cold water down his back. 
 
 Suddenly the noise died away in a long-drawn howl, 
 that we knew to be the voice of Antoninus Pius ; then 
 there was dead silence, and when the back benches for 
 very shame joined once more in the responses, Witstock 
 whispered reassuringly, 
 
 " Crocodile's laid out cold ! " 
 
 And at the next Amen Buck jerked out " Praise the 
 Lord ! " by way of answer, with a heart-felt relief that 
 was by no means irreverent. 
 
 Once out of the room we went upstairs with an un- 
 unseemly rush. There was a little group of servants on 
 the landing outside Buck's room ; where, stone-dead, lay 
 the gaunt yellow body of Antoninus Pius, and over him, 
 
 E 
 
66 CROCODILE. 
 
 gasping for breath and streaming with blood from half- 
 a-dozen hideous wounds, stood the bull-terrier ; Sin was 
 his name, and like Sin he must have fought. The fray 
 had begun in Buck's room, where the hearthrug was 
 rolled aside, and a small table or two upset. We could 
 guess how the old Crocodile had stalked in upon our 
 unsuspecting guest, and taken his stand with forelegs 
 apart before the fire, to gain the advantage of the flickering 
 light before he challenged Sin to his last battle. Round 
 the room, out and across the passage they had grappled, 
 but the bull-terrier, true to his bull-baiting instincts, had 
 taken the foe by his great shaggy dewlap and never 
 relaxed his grip for one instant until he had bitten home 
 to the throat. We lifted him tenderly, and he recovered 
 to gladden the heart of his master on his return from the 
 Land of Regrets. 
 
 So at last died Antoninus Pius, full of days and 
 dishonour and human calves. He had lived and 
 ravened among us for two whole years, an outcast and 
 pariah among men and dogs, an object of adoration to 
 my tutor's wife, and of dread to the other ladies of the 
 place, hated and hating with right good-will. And my 
 tutor's wife came and mourned over her bloodhound, as 
 she still persisted in calling him, and asked us with bated 
 breath to forgive the dreadful dog that had done the 
 cruel deed a request which we had no hesitation in 
 granting ; and, as she mourned, the rest of us could hardly 
 do less (how many of us are hypocrites where a woman's 
 tender feelings are at stake) than give him a solemn funeral 
 in a corner of the garden, with full military honours by a 
 member of the Shooting Eight, who had secreted a packet 
 
CROCODILE. 
 
 67 
 
 of blank cartridge at the last Field-day. I grieve to say 
 that on that self-same night the mercenary Peter Frank 
 disinterred the remains, and sold them for a goodly price 
 to the man whom I have had occasion to mention before 
 as an ingenious manufacturer of tigerskin rugs. He cured 
 and tanned the skin with care, and sold it by special 
 arrangement to the Shiny Fag. To what base uses ! 
 " Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, 
 Might stop a hole to keep the wind away." 
 
 Full little does my tutor's wife suspect that the black 
 and yellow hide of her beloved Bloodhound is now 
 degraded into a tigerskin rug to cover the humble bed- 
 stead of the Shiny Fag. 
 
 Such is the Irony of Fate. 
 
 And now that he is gone, and we have no Crocodile 
 against whom to hurl imprecations and cherish grudges 
 and form conspiracies, not one of us but feels that some 
 of the brightness has gone out of his life, and that to lose 
 an old enemy is almost as painful as to lose an old friend. 
 
 E 2 
 
THE BEAGLES. 
 
 -Far afield 
 
 The trailing beagles music made ; 
 
 We followed, for we would not yield, 
 We rattled down the rushy glade, 
 
 And up the stubble ; how I knew 
 The countryside I used to range ; 
 
 Could count the very elms that grew 
 About the roofs of Dorney Grange." 
 
 ETON FORTNIGHTLY. 
 
 WE know people who are superior to the Beagles, 
 just as others are superior to Shakspere and 
 strawberry messes. They would class all three together 
 as among the tamest and flattest of the mild diversions of 
 the milder section of society. The Animal who has drunk 
 deep of the pleasures of Town before he has tapped the 
 fountain of learning : who is dabbling in the excitement 
 of the Music Halls at an age when better brought up little 
 boys are still being taken by their nurses to the Zoo : 
 who has grown aweary of champagne, (but is able late 
 at night to call up spirits from the vasty deep of an 
 innocent-looking ottoman), and announces that for pru- 
 dential reasons connected with his liver he must in the 
 future restrict his consumption of tobacco to three cigars 
 a day, at a season when his compeers in age are dubiously 
 entering on the nauseous path which is paved with half- 
 drained liqueur-glasses and partially-smoked cigarettes : 
 this Animal for Boy he is not, and Man he is not is 
 very apt to scoff at the Beagles, and at Shakspere, and at 
 strawberry messes. 
 
THE BEAGLES. 69 
 
 We do not altogether blame him, for the Scoffer's 
 attitude is often a pleasant one, and we have been assured 
 by those who have sat in it that the Seat of the Scornful 
 is far from uncomfortable. The Scoffer lies on the bank 
 while the other fellow fishes, and sits in the Pavilion 
 while the other fellow fields. He reads a novel while the 
 other fellow tramps the moor, and cuts up the grouse that 
 the other fellow snoots. And when the other fellow 
 writes a book the Scoffer cuts that up too, cuts it up most 
 mercilessly. 
 
 Personally, we are habitual Scoffers ; but when the 
 other fellow does succeed we are not ashamed to pat him 
 on the back. We don't content ourselves with asking in 
 supercilious tones whether after all the game is worth 
 the candle and then eating more than our fair share of 
 the fifteen pound salmon or the late brace of grouse. 
 We flatter ourselves that we recognize true merit and 
 that we have found it in the Eton College Hunt. So, if 
 you are a Scoffer in the matter of the Beagles, we shall 
 make it our business to convert you. 
 
 Come and run with us for a single afternoon or walk, 
 if London pavement and London hansoms and London 
 lifts have taken all the muscle out of your calves. If 
 only you understood your constitution you would thank 
 your stars that a man, if he goes into society at all, must 
 still walk upstairs occasionally. It is only the stairs that 
 save you from stays, and a longer watch-chain and utter 
 rotundity. All right, we don't mean to hurt your 
 feelings. 
 
 You must choose a fine bright crisp day in March, and 
 lucky you are if you find one ; you must fortify your 
 
70 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 lines (we talk of the lines of a fort and we talk of the 
 gracefully swelling lines of a man-o'-war why not of the 
 gracefully swelling lines of a man about town ?) with a 
 good solid luncheon : none of your flimsy, gossamer 
 Club luncheons, but the sort of training lunch that they 
 understand so well at Tap the rich, juicy, mahogany- 
 tinted chop and the good English cheese, and the good 
 Burton beer : nothing stronger. Next you must put on 
 a pair of knickerbockers, the older and coarser the 
 better, in place of those trousers that bear a most 
 incriminating look of novelty and fashion ; off with those 
 patent-leather trotter-cases, and let your Eton bootmaker 
 (I hope you stick to him still) find a pair of light strong 
 beagle shoes to fit you. Wind a thin scarf about your 
 neck and try to look as if you were not ashamed of going 
 collarless for once. You want some kind of a shooting- 
 Coat and a cloth-cap to complete your outfit ; and now, if 
 you have the feelings and the figure of a man and not of 
 a masher, you will feel more comfortable and look more 
 picturesque than you have for many a long day. 
 
 We will look in upon Absence. Yes, the Head " still 
 calls Absence from Chapel steps." These extraordinary 
 individuals in top-hats and long great coats with stockings 
 and muddy shoes emerging below ? They are our fellow- 
 sportsmen. And now, as you like to take things easy, we 
 will be jogging quietly through the Playing Fields towards 
 the meet. The old trees are already showing the green 
 tips of leaves here and there, and the rooks are fooling 
 around last year's nests with bits of stick in their beaks, 
 doing their best to look like experienced fathers of families : 
 whereas in reality they have not the smallest conception 
 
THE BEAGLES, 71 
 
 of the small end of the shadow of an idea why they should 
 be building an elaborate erection, shaped like a soup plate, 
 up in the windy top of a dangerously high tree. But 
 they do it. And uncommonly mystified and puzzled 
 they are by the first egg. 
 
 We take the double stile in our stride and pound on 
 steadily enough down the long white path that crosses 
 Agar's rugged " plough " like the petrified wake of an 
 ocean steamer : smashing through fences, straddling over 
 yawning stagnant ditches mind the barbed wire on the 
 far side and at last we pull up panting (at least you do, 
 old Clubman, while we haven't turned a hair) at Aldin 
 House, or Upton Church, or Ditton Cross Roads. 
 Hounds are here before us, caged in their cart, making an 
 appalling noise and a still more awful smell : what 
 Apollonius Rhodius would call " a countless odour." 
 Pray don't scoff, my dear friend ; bad as they are, there 
 are worse noises and worse smells in Piccadilly. You 
 remark with truth that birds in their little nests agree, 
 but beagles don't seem to. See how that young one, 
 grown weary of waiting, is trying to extend his sphere of 
 usefulness by gnawing at his neighbour's tail. It is an 
 unnecessarily long tail, but the owner isn't aware of that ; 
 he turns sharp round to do battle and there breaks out 
 a chorus of quarrelsome voices which warns the attendant 
 kennelman that a canine massacre is impending. 
 
 But at this moment there is a sound of hoofs in the 
 distance like a charge of cavalry, and round yonder corner 
 sweeps a gallant company of half a hundred runners, with 
 the Master and his three Whips at their head conspicuous 
 in brown velvet coats and kJiaki knickerbockers bleached 
 
72 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 by repeated washings as white as driven snow. Hounds 
 become more excited than ever inside their bars. There 
 is some cracking of whips and some strong language which 
 fails to quiet them, and presently a sparred plank is set 
 against the cart, and on the opening of the door a Niagara 
 of yelping, struggling, howling and particularly malodorous 
 fiends in canine form comes tumbling to the ground. 
 Dwarfs they may be, but uncommonly good looking 
 dwarfs, very unlike the " scratch lots '' of some years 
 back, one half of which were like bad fox-hounds roughly 
 chipped to the requisite size with a carving knife, and the 
 other like weedy overgrown fox-terriers : not to mention 
 one or two extraordinary creatures, which might have 
 been otter-hounds and might have been dachshunds, but 
 very often had the best noses in the pack. Nowadays our 
 hounds are picked out with the greatest care. You fancy 
 you know something about hounds ? Then I think we 
 can show you a dog or two worth looking at. 
 
 The Master has generally gained his experience at 
 home as well as in the capacity of Whip in previous 
 years. This office is no sinecure, if only because he must 
 understand the art of cracking a whip more scientifically, 
 and of producing a clearer, fuller, and more mellow 
 report, than any of his Whips ; otherwise he loses 
 prestige in the eyes of the Field. He does not often 
 exhibit his skill, but when he does it is as when Jove nods ; 
 the earth shakes : and gods and men and beasts tremble. 
 But if in spite of diligent practice in the Playing Fields 
 before early school he finds that his Whip still excels him, 
 rumour says (and it is needless to add that rumour often 
 proves a liar) that he has been know to bribe his subordi- 
 
' 
 
 THE BEAGLES. 73 
 
 nate to hide his light beneath a bushel. (This last 
 sentence is in reality less mixed than would appear at first 
 sight.) 
 
 Further he must be able to wind his horn, not only 
 while standing with his back firmly planted against a 
 gate, as has sometimes been found necessary, but while 
 crossing ridge and furrow at a brisk trot j if he can 
 manage this, and learn to crack his whip at the same 
 moment with easy grace, he has made a good beginning. 
 But this is not all. He must combine the suaviter in 
 modo with fo&fortiter in re : the tact and courtesy of the 
 Speaker on a u lively night " with the austere ferocity of 
 an Irish Member in Committee of Supplies. 
 
 Sometimes, like the Irish Secretary, he judges it wise 
 to wear a shirt-of-mail under his coat, as a defence against 
 attempts at assassination on the part of the Third Whip, 
 whose duties are often of the most menial and 
 exasperating nature, and chiefly consist in running the 
 outside circle of big fallow fields, while the Master strolls 
 along in the centre. In short the Eton boy who has lung- 
 power and temper, and perseverance enough to succeed 
 as Master of the Beagles, will find himself in all essential 
 characteristics pretty well qualified for the Parliamentary 
 Warpath. 
 
 He is one of the few great men who do not use a 
 private secretary, and yet he has to keep on good terms 
 with any number of correspondents : such as the old 
 gentleman whose coverts have been disturbed his letter 
 generally contains the admission " I was a boy myself 
 
 once, but ," and he believes that the Master of the 
 
 Beagles is one of the Staff, a graduate of Oxford or 
 
74 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 Cambridge. Then there is the dear maiden lady who 
 declares that " the Dogs have been done serious damage 
 to my cucumber-frames, as well as alarmed the avadavats 
 in my aviary : which is most undesirable in the nesting- 
 season. I fear that my bed of spring lettuces is irretrievably 
 ruined. You must be aware that you entered my premises 
 in defiance of the express warning of Samuel, my 
 gardener " : the truth being that the wily Samuel showed 
 the Master where his hare had squatted, opened the gate 
 to him, and received half-a-crown for his trouble. And 
 there is the surly farmer who has by this time forgotten 
 the present of game for which he thanked the Hunt so 
 profusely in the autumn, and now demands a couple of 
 sovereigns as compensation for damage done to the south 
 fence of his ten-acre field ; but is check-mated when a 
 hedger sent from Eton repairs the gap for the sum of 
 three shillings and tenpence. 
 
 Happily for the Master's temper some of his correspon- 
 dents are more friendly. Here is a note from a sound- 
 hearted squire, an Eton man and a good fellow to boot, 
 who apologizes for the " uncalled-for interference" of his 
 keepers last Saturday, and " will be very glad if you will 
 come up to the house and have some refreshments 
 whenever you are in this direction." And very careful 
 we all are not to put up his pheasants after that. 
 
 There are several methods of hunting with Beagles, 
 ranging from the sublime heights of enthusiasm to the 
 lowest depths of laziness from climbing a tree to mark 
 the vanishing hare while hounds are being put upon her 
 line, to lying on your back in a ditch to hear the music of 
 the pack more clearly as it rings along the ground. The 
 
THE BEAGLES. 75 
 
 two extremes may be exemplified in the habits of the 
 Ardent Sportsman on the one hand and of the Dis- 
 interested Observer on the other. 
 
 The Ardent Sportsman runs all the way to the meet, 
 tramps with great violence over innumerable ploughed 
 fields, and makes it his object to keep within a field of the 
 leading hound from beginning to end of the run. He 
 may be identified by the mud-splashes on his cheeks, the 
 result of hurrying to the meet over puddlous* roads, by an 
 undefinable air of youthful excitement pervading eyes and 
 mouth and elbows, and by a tendency to shout Tally-ho 
 and There she goes on such small provocation as is offered 
 by a rabbit, a tortoise-shell cat, or even a dropsical turnip. 
 
 At the opposite pole to the Ardent Sportsman may be 
 found the Disinterested Observer. He is careful to take 
 life easily, gently, and meditatively. He walks to the 
 meet and arrives there clean. He ascertains the direction 
 in which the line will wheel, and walks on the inner flank. 
 When the run begins he puts on a sad smile as of superior 
 wisdom, and calmly watches the Ardent Sportsman 
 disappear over distant fences. Then he makes his way to 
 the nearest haystack, gate, or other coign of vantage, and 
 feels secure in his knowledge of the rule that nine hares 
 out of ten run a ring and come back to the field whence 
 they started : or rather he imagines this to be a rule, and 
 sometimes he is grievously disappointed. Accordingly he 
 gives his scarf another turn round his neck, chooses the 
 
 * Publisher to Authors " There is no such word as puddlous in the 
 English Dictionary. Please explain." 
 
 Authors to Publisher "We are not responsible for the vagaries of 
 Lexicographers. No explanations." 
 
76 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 least uncomfortable seat he can find, thinks of delicious 
 honeydew and delicately-coloured pipes, and finds what 
 pleasure he can in contemplating the scenery. Which is 
 not as a rule worth the contemplating. Our friend 
 Witstock used to say that he could make better scenery 
 than that round Eton with a billiard-table, a box of 
 matches, and a bucket of dirty water. But Witstock 
 always had high opinions of his own inventive genius. 
 
 Yet he was right about the box of matches for the 
 hedgerows. The trees are interesting only as specimens 
 of telegraph poles that have led a dissipated life and given 
 up the practice of shaving. Their trunks are as bare as 
 your hand, for the new plan of " high farming " gets rid 
 of all boughs that may overshadow the crops ; but at the 
 very top there is an abandoned unkempt tuft of matted 
 vegetation, just to show that the tree was originally a tree 
 and not a telegraph pole or a flag-staff. You must get 
 out to Dorney Common (the finest prospect in England, 
 as an illustrious native has often averred) or to Ditton 
 Park or even to Richings, before you find the grand long- 
 limbed trees without which the softest, smoothest turf looks 
 bare and unclothed : because without timber there can be 
 no warmth of landscape, no chequered light and shade. 
 Here the u hideous leprosy ' 1 of dreary brick, the dismal 
 rows of gaunt yellow sentry-boxes, are left far behind. 
 Here one may see flights of small birds that have not learnt 
 to keep out of stone's throw, fields of flowers unsmirched 
 by smoke, or even an honest hill or two. Here even a lazy 
 Disinterested Observer can be at one with nature, and get 
 some notion at least of what this poor old blistered, 
 pimpled earth was meant by its Maker to be. 
 
THE BEAGLES. 77 
 
 We left the Observer sitting on a gate with his hands 
 in his pockets and his thoughts in the clouds, and the 
 Ardent Sportsman plodding knee-deep in ridge and 
 furrow behind the hounds, splashing through brooks 
 which are seven parts mud to two of water and one of 
 pale green slime, lacerating his knees and shoulders in 
 barbed wire fences, and generally increasing his resem- 
 blance to an elderly scarecrow running " amok." 
 
 From his elevated position the former marks by eye 
 and ear a series of checks. He notes how the gaudy caps 
 in a score of different colours and patterns produce a pleas- 
 ingly variegated effect as they scatter towards the horizon. 
 For a time the pack have been lost to sight behind the 
 church and public-houses and gardens of yonder hamlet, 
 when hullo ! here's the hare himself, trickling along a 
 hedgerow a hundred yards away. (This is another point of 
 difference ; the Disinterested Observer calls his quarry 
 Him : the Ardent Sportsman makes a point of calling 
 him Her). His head is not carried so proudly aloft as 
 when he started ; there are signs of distress in his failing 
 legs ; and all his flanks and belly are coated with red 
 mire*. He is " sorely hard-up " as they say in the 
 Lowlands, and suddenly swerves out from the hedge. 
 Headed ? No, only a bullock moving through the grass ; 
 but the poor gentleman's nerves are not so good or so 
 steady as they were forty minutes ago ; and on he comes 
 with uncertain breath and glazing eyes, labouring across 
 
 * Publisher to Authors " Does this description refer to the Ardent 
 Sportsman ? If so, is it not a trifle strong ? " 
 
 Authors to Publisher" Ask a policeman." 
 
78 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 the fallow, only to squat in exhaustion some fifty yards to 
 our right. 
 
 And here by all that's fast and furious come the pack, 
 or at any rate the pick of them. Scent for a wonder is 
 good, and things look well for a kill. But the Disinter- 
 ested Observer refrains from counting his unhatched 
 chickens ; he knows the traditions of the E. C. H., and 
 fully expects to see a large man carrying a venerable rusty 
 gun emerge from yonder cottage garden, approach with 
 considerable caution such as is always commendable in 
 the presence of wild beasts within twenty yards of the 
 squatting hare, take a steady aim, and blow him to pieces 
 under the very noses of the pack. 
 
 To-day the Murderer does not appear ; it may be that 
 he is engaged on official duties elsewhere, perhaps as 
 Public Executioner (or Common Hangman), perhaps as 
 author of slanderous paragraphs about Eton in the society 
 papers. 
 
 And now hounds are racing across the fallow, and but 
 here the pen refuses to go on. A man may tell without 
 shame of the death of a good fox ; as a wise writer has 
 said, wait till you have seen him dead-beat turning to 
 bay in the middle of a field, with the leading hound just 
 running in to him, and judge for yourself which of the 
 two creatures is more afraid. There cannot be much 
 doubt. Sportsmen to the core, we love and honour the 
 bonny red poacher-lad, bred in our coverts, fed on our 
 pheasants, dead for our sport ; and if he prefers the rich 
 man's " guinea fowls " (" Up gets a guinea, bang goes a 
 penny farthing, down comes three and sixpence ") to the 
 poor man's twopenny-halfpenny poultry, why so did 
 
THE BEAGLES. 79 
 
 Hereward and Robin Hood and Clym o' the Cleugh and 
 many another bold outlaw : and as Hereward and his 
 peers have ever died, grim and game to the last, so dies a 
 good fox. 
 
 And a good hare ? Ah, a dying hare is a sorry sight. 
 But the hounds are weaker brethren our brethren as 
 much as the Choctaw and the Masai and the Ostiaks, and 
 howling savages at that ; nor can we go a-hunting 
 without them. As the French general is reported to 
 have answered a clergyman who remonstrated with him 
 about the tortures which his Red Indian allies were 
 inflicting on their prisoners : " Barbarity, sir, it may be ; 
 but it's the only pay these devils will take ! " And now 
 the breath of his pursuers is hot on his flank, and down 
 he goes before the crew of struggling hungry fiends, 
 ringed in by a score of gleaming jaws. 
 
 There is a flash of white breeches and bright cap across 
 the grass. Crash ! comes the Master through the fence 
 with arms across his face, and traverses the plough at that 
 long sling-trot which once learned is never forgotten : 
 which won the battle of Marathon and still wins the 
 Cross-country Championship. With this reflection and 
 a passing twinge of envy the Disinterested Observer 
 drops from his perch, stretches his cold and stiffening 
 limbs, and surveys the scene of slaughter. The Master 
 produces a long-bladed knife and goes through the process 
 of breaking up the hare in the presence of an admiring 
 throng of half-grown rustics, who delight in the gory 
 accompaniments of a kill ; and all the while there is an 
 undercurrent of growls, petty jealousies and incipient 
 quarrels over scraps of carrion, to be appeased by the 
 
8o THE BEAGLES. 
 
 impartial lashes of the Whips, who have by this time 
 forced their way into the circle of revellers. 
 
 The Eton College Hunt seldom has a blank day, but it 
 knows what disappointment means. The depravity of the 
 rustic nature is in some respects unsurpassed by anything 
 that urban slums can show. When hounds have thrown 
 up their heads in a cottage garden, and the finger of sus- 
 picion points at the owner of the cottage (who may or 
 may not be hiding in his pigsty at the moment), we have 
 known the entire population of a village come out and lie 
 with astonishing vigour and consistency. On such an 
 occasion the wiliest of the three Whips should be told off 
 to make friends with the Small boys who hang about the 
 skirts of the crowd. 
 
 When he has gained their confidence he should ask in 
 an off-hand manner, u Did you see him kill the hare ? " 
 " Noa. Tummas Braown seed 'im." 
 " Was it a big hare ? " 
 
 " Ye-as. John Mullins couldn't 'ardly get 'un into 'is 
 cooat-like." 
 
 "Where is John Mullins? I don't believe you know." 
 " But I do. 'E be 'idin' in Ws pigsty." 
 Two minutes later half a dozen stalwart Etonians may 
 be seen bearing down upon John Mullins' pigsty. Over 
 the pigsty scene we will draw a veil. 
 
 It is a great mistake to say that the bucolic mind 
 naturally understands sport. We remember that once we 
 checked near Wraysbury in the midst of a very exciting 
 run. 
 
 " Have you seen a hare ? " shouted the Master to a 
 rustic in the adjoining field. 
 
THE BEAGLES. 81 
 
 " Ye-es, I 'ave seed an 'are," was the deliberate answer. 
 
 " How long ago ? " 
 
 " Well, it mought a-been yesterday, and it mought a- 
 been the day before : but I'm thinking it was on Sunday! " 
 
 Whereupon the First Whip swore a great oath, grasped 
 his crop firmly, and asked someone to tell the Master that 
 he had gone to commit a small murder. He was pacified 
 with difficulty, and at last consented to forego his revenge 
 on the ground that it might bring the Hunt into bad 
 odour. A few minutes afterwards he completely regained 
 his good humour and equanimity by throwing three and 
 a half couple of hounds into the Colne : himself going 
 round by the bridge. 
 
 There happened to be a bridge that time. When there 
 is no bridge the Master is bound to follow his hounds, and 
 more than one gallant swim has resulted from the rule 
 that the controllers of the Hunt should ever strive to out- 
 do their comrades in the chase. Testis, the pond in Ditton 
 Park, twice swum. It may not sound a very great feat, 
 but, " all I can say is try it yourself at Ditton Park, in 
 icy weather and a heavy beagle coat : you will emerge and 
 feel thankful for warm .drinks. 
 
 "Witstock," said that small hero's tutor to him one 
 evening when he came in dripping, " under the circum- 
 stances I think that a glass of brandy-and-water might do 
 you no harm." 
 
 u Well, Sir," said Witstock, who never could be serious 
 except with the rudder-strings in his hands, " I suppose 
 that means I'm to drink the water now : because I've just 
 had the brandy neat." 
 
 His tutor our tutor now looked somewhat shocked. 
 
82 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 "In a public-house, Witstock ? I trust not." 
 " In a private house, Sir. I fell into a man's pond, and 
 he asked me in and gave me a drink ; I took it neat, Sir, 
 because it was less to carry that way. Wanted to lend me 
 dry clothes, but I said I was in a hurry to get back 
 Private Business, Sir." It stands eternally to that tutor's 
 credit that he did not laugh. 
 
 But if there was a humorous twinkle in Witstock's eye 
 as he made this last astounding statement (for he was 
 known to hate Private as a cat hates water), there was a 
 smile in his tutor's voice as he answered : 
 
 " Quite right. Showed a very proper spirit. Very 
 gratifying to find you taking such an interest in your 
 studies. Go and change, or you'll catch cold. Trot." 
 Then he called him back. 
 " Witstock!" 
 "Yes, Sir." 
 
 " On second thoughts I shall have no Private to-night." 
 u Thank you, Sir. That's awfully good of you, Sir." 
 And there was a half amused, half sad look on his tutor's 
 face as the boy who " took such an interest in his studies" 
 went clattering upstairs. For this tutor was one who had 
 more sympathy with the weary beagler than many. Some 
 of the authorities take up a very curious position with 
 regard to the E. C. H., and regard the love of sport that 
 is implanted in every boy with mingled pity and contempt, 
 as an inexplicable blemish in an otherwise tolerable char- 
 acter, if not as an actual proof of natural depravity. " We 
 had a good run yesterday, Sir," said a budding Nimrod 
 to his tutor at dinner one day, after making Atlantean 
 efforts to bear up the burden of conversation. 
 
THE BEAGLES. 83 
 
 " Oh, you did, did you ? " said the man of pens and 
 peace. " Now I come to think of it, I did hear your 
 dogs shrieking in the afternoon." 
 
 On the other hand it must be admitted that our 
 
 .tructors sometimes find their pupils taking an equally 
 perverted view of the aim and object of Beagling and the 
 benefits to be derived therefrom. Just as London police- 
 men are said to use the scenes of recent murders and 
 burglaries and robberies with violence as a sort of memoria 
 technica or key to the geography of the Metropolis, so we 
 once knew a beagler whose knowledge of the neighbour- 
 hood took the form of a mental map in which public- 
 houses stood out in red capitals. " Never mind," he would 
 say when our hare headed straight away from home ; "all 
 on the way to the Green Man." 
 
 If you asked him where you were, he could tell you to a 
 nicety. "A mile and a quarter south-east of the Red 
 Lion. The Pineapple's down in that hollow in front, 
 and the Bricklayers' Arms somewhere away to the 
 right." Happily he was an exception ; few of us are so 
 well versed in the bibulous capacities of the human frame 
 as he was, and even he seldom visited these establishments, 
 for he had sense enough to see that it was bad form. And 
 at Eton bad form is the Eighth Deadly Sin. 
 
 " Call that a pub ! " he would say with rising choler. 
 " Do you think they could mix me a Stone-wall Eye- 
 opener ? Do you think they know their way to a Split 
 Nutmeg or a Prairie Oyster ? Call that a pub ! " and he 
 turned up his noble nose in scorn, being a very 
 supercilious person in the matter of drinks. 
 
 F 2 
 
84 THE BEAGLES. 
 
 So we beguile our homeward journey with trifling talk 
 and sporting " shop." I'll warrant, old friend, that you 
 have enjoyed your run, and will never again talk slight- 
 ingly of "a drove of tame spotted dogs." Will I dine 
 with you at the Christopher ? With the greatest pleasure. 
 Will I come and enjoy your hospitality in Town ? Again, 
 with the greatest pleasure. But I doubt if either of us 
 will earn such an appetite on the London pavement as we 
 have sought and won this day across the ploughs and 
 pastures of Buckinghamshire. 
 
ACROSS THE WALL. 
 
 I 
 
 Bouv dXowMra ou 
 
 HAVE a Story to tell : a Story without a Moral : 
 without a Moral of any kind for anyone. 
 
 Once upon a time there was a Master of the Beagles 
 whom we will not particularize further than by saying 
 that he bore the not uncommon nickname of Binks. He 
 may also have been President of Pop, or he may have 
 been Captain of the Eleven, or of the Boats, or he may 
 have been all four ; but at all events this Master of the 
 Beagles was a very great and distinguished personage. 
 And though he was not alarmingly industrious or gifted 
 with very high abilities, yet on the whole this Master of 
 the Beagles (like all swells at Eton) was a good boy, and 
 only erred from time to time just enough to keep his 
 conscience in working order. 
 
 It was one afternoon when he had accomplished the 
 rare success of a double kill early in February ; but the 
 pack had split, and for something like an hour after lock- 
 up he and his three comrades strove in vain to find the 
 missing hounds. At last, conscious of arrears of work and 
 of vows made to his tutor, this virtuous Master of the 
 Beagles reluctantly handed over his horn to his First 
 Whip and started homewards. He ran the four miles in 
 something under forty minutes no easy task when you 
 have been roaming pretty continuously for three hours, 
 and arrived in the Playing Fields utterly "cooked " as the 
 
86 ACROSS THE WALL. 
 
 clock struck seven. The night was black as a Colleger's 
 gown, and not till he was within a yard or two of the gate 
 that leads into Weston's Yard did he discover that it was 
 shut. So was the door of the Cloisters. A though, 
 struck him that he might get over the Wall by the iron 
 ladder : accordingly he used his last remaining strength 
 as it seemed, to scramble over the railings, and groped 
 along the Wall for the ladder. 
 
 The ladder was gone. 
 
 He might retrace his steps by Sheep Bridge and fetch 
 a compass round by the Pavilion : or and this was a 
 suggestion that startled him by its boldness he might 
 climb the Wall. It was a feat that not one Etonian in 
 twenty would have dreamed of under any circumstances : 
 not one out of a hundred in the dark when alone and 
 utterly exhausted. Nevertheless, any risk seemed more 
 welcome than the long journey round Fellows' Pond ; so 
 he began to feel about for the rings through which the 
 hooks of the ladder are passed rings about ten feet from 
 the ground, for the Wall, though much lower on the 
 Slough Road side, measures fully eleven feet from the 
 level of the Playing Fields. 
 
 He found these rings at last, and passed the head of his 
 hunting crop over one of them : over, not through, for 
 the rings are turned upwards. Then, trusting to the 
 muscles of his arms and the tough core of his whip, and 
 the rough notches of its horn shank (lest it should slip 
 and dash him to the ground), he began to draw his body 
 upwards. 
 
 Do you remember the scene in She where Holly hangs 
 in mid-air from the spur of rock, and Leo draws him up 
 
ACROSS THE WALL. 87 
 
 by his wrists : how for a few seconds he swings to and fro, 
 and hears his comrade's sinews cracking and then is lifted 
 up as though he were a little child, till he gets his arm 
 -)und the rock and his chest is resting on it ? In much 
 the same way did the Master of the Beagles hang by his 
 wrists ; but he had no stalwart friend at the top to help 
 him, only his old whip stock that had been bent and 
 broken and spliced once and again. Very cautiously he 
 wedged his feet into crannies between the bricks, very 
 cannily he released one hand and groped for the ring, 
 and, when he found it, slid the other up, took the whip 
 between his teeth, and then by a single tremendous effort 
 reached the coping-stone at full stretch of his right arm 
 and swung himself to the top. As he rested there, cold 
 though the night was, he found himself damp from head 
 to foot with sudden sweat. 
 
 " Tell my tutor that I have come in," he said to the 
 man who opened the door for him. Upstairs he found that 
 his fags, who were good fags as fags go, had made ready 
 a roaring fire, a good tea, and a bath surrounded by a little 
 regiment of hot water cans. He undressed in the passage, 
 after the simple custom of certain houses, and was soon 
 toying with the warm sponge, and rejoicing in the antici- 
 pation of four plump sausages, now cracking their jolly 
 skins before the fire and oozy with hissing bounteousness 
 of juice. 
 
 In the midst of these pleasant plashings he heard the 
 door of pupil-room shut, and steps came up the stairs and 
 along the passage. (No. This is not the story of the boy 
 who thought it was his pal entering the room, and threw 
 a sponge full of dirty water, and found that he had hit his 
 
88 ACROSS THE WALL. 
 
 tutor). It was a fag, a new boy, who was so amazed at 
 the unexpected circumstance of finding a Master of the 
 Beagles in a bath, that for a time he could only open eyes 
 and mouth very wide and pant. 
 
 " Well ? " said the Master of the Beagles rather irritably, 
 and blushing a little ; for the open door admitted a 
 draught, and his sense of modesty was highly developed. 
 
 " Please, Binks," began the boy, and then stopped in 
 complete confusion. The Master of the Beagles was more 
 amused than angry ; he knew that everybody in the 
 house, from his tutor's baby to the scullery maid, called 
 him Binks. 
 
 " Well ? " he repeated. 
 
 The boy gathered his wits together and hurled the 
 
 message out. " Please, my tutor wants " he stopped 
 
 short. 
 
 u By Jove, he wants me to come to dinner," thought 
 the hero in his bath. 
 
 " Well ? " he said for the third time, but more gently. 
 
 " My tutor wants to know why you weren't in pupil- 
 room an hour ago, learning your lessons for to-morrow. 
 Please, he says you're to come at once." Then he shut 
 the door and went away trembling. 
 
 The Master of the Beagles sponged himself like one in 
 a dream. He stared at the brave show of caps and cups 
 upon his walls ; he stared at the three burnished horns, 
 the emblems of his office, standing in a group on his 
 bureau ; he stared at the clock ticking on his mantel- 
 shelf it was barely fourteen minutes since he had climbed 
 the Wall ; he stared at the marks left by barbed wire on 
 his legs and hands, some old scars, some new wounds ; 
 
ACROSS THE WALL. 89 
 
 and at last he stretched out his wet hand to a low shelf 
 and took down the dingy little volume of Selections from 
 'Cicero child's play to most of his friends, but an instru- 
 ment of torture to him : and there was no crib to the 
 book in those days. He turned over a page or two and 
 glanced at the paltry headings, An Unhappy Tyrant, 
 Hunger is the best Sauce, Man wants but little here 
 below. 
 
 " He says you're to come at once." 
 
 The Master of the Beagles dropped the book, and 
 scowled again at the caps and the silver cups and the 
 burnished horns, at the clock upon the mantel-piece, and 
 the sausages before the fire. 
 
 " He says you're to come at once." 
 
 The Master of the Beagles sponged the cuts on his leg ; 
 he passed his hand over the soft hair on his upper lip, and 
 the bristles on his chin. 
 
 "And this," he said thoughtfully, "this is greatness. 
 This is greatness. My last Half, too." 
 
 A single tear fell and mingled with the soap and water. 
 The bath was growing cold. He stepped out, and as he 
 did so his eye fell on the heading in the hateful little book 
 that lay open on the floor Hunger is the best Sauce. 
 
 He picked it up, dressed and strode down to pupil-room. 
 
 He was at Eton six weeks longer ; but to my certain 
 knowledge he never learned another lesson. 
 
 And this is a Story without a Moral : without a Moral 
 of any kind for anybody. 
 
 \\ B R A 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 
 
 Flats S s &v KciKoy jjLey Spay TI Trpoiic 1 
 auros Trap* aurou jJiayOaVwi' aVeu ir6i>oi 
 Ta XP'H ' ^'j "^' ^ k T 
 
 ', dXXa KKTT]Tat 
 
 AT Eton he was Bucklebury's henchman. At home 
 he was Heir Apparent to the island kingdom of 
 Hu-kiwauka in the South Seas. There was a story which 
 everyone repeated and no one believed, that when he 
 came to Eton as a new boy some years before, he was 
 clothed very simply in the native costume a coat of blue 
 paint and a tasselled girdle of monkeys' tails. It is true 
 that there are no monkeys, and consequently no great 
 supply of monkeys' tails, in Hu-kiwauka ; but this, as 
 Witstock once remarked when Pundemonium was upon 
 him, is only a detail and does not materially weaken the 
 legend as a whole. It was added that three tailors plied 
 the needle with right good-will from dewy eve till morn- 
 ing light, in order to provide the young prince with 
 fitting garments for his first appearance at early school. 
 For the rest, he was a small, well-made boy with a hand- 
 some dark face, closely-curling hair, and the very hurri- 
 cane of a temper. 
 
 His father, the King of Hu-kiwauka, could trace his 
 descent in an unbroken line from the fish-god Hu-ki, 
 who reigned over Hu-kiwauka somewhere about the fifth 
 century of our era. This lusty savage ruled his people 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 91 
 
 after the latest and most enlightened European fashion ; 
 that is to say, whisky and euchre were the two pillars of 
 his constitution, and he considered the administration of 
 justice to be synonymous with a free use of the best make 
 of American revolver. If he had only been able to cmmt, 
 he would have been a master of finance ; indeed on the 
 occasion of a prolonged refusal on the part of his Lower 
 Chamber to grant supplies, it is recorded that he broke 
 the best part of an expensive dinner-service on the head 
 of his Minister of the Interior (who also acted as Head 
 Cook) and then proceeded to retrench by wearing no 
 clothes and drinking his champagne, for want of glasses, out 
 of a stable-bucket ; after this he proved himself peculiarly 
 handy in quelling sedition with a heavy fish-bone hatchet, 
 so that for a few days the death-rate of the capital varied 
 in inverse proportion to the monarch's washing-bill. In 
 every respect he was a ruler of whom the Hu-kiwaukans 
 might justly be proud. 
 
 The Shiny Fag's mother was a wealthy and beautiful 
 American, whose parents, having achieved very great 
 success in the Aerated Coffin business, and no success 
 whatever in the best circles of Parisian society, had 
 impressed upon her from the first the propriety of forming 
 a matrimonial alliance with one of the Crowned Heads of 
 of the Old World. As it happened, the demand for 
 royal bridegrooms at this time greatly outran the supply ; 
 only one Emperor and two Kings were available, and the 
 former was a victim to religious mania, while of the 
 latter one lived in daily fear of death by apoplexy and 
 the other by dynamite. Grand Dukes, of course, were 
 a drug in the market, and Princes of the Blood might 
 
92 THE SHINY FAG. 
 
 almost be had for the asking by anyone who would pay 
 the expenses of carriage, but at such a mesalliance the 
 daughter of the Aerated Coffin firm turned up her 
 democratic nose. Europe from Biscay to Caspian was 
 drawn blank. Asia was out of the question, because 
 there a queen must share her throne with several hundreds 
 of equally favoured consorts. In the same way there were 
 plenty of kings in Africa, but they were very much 
 married already, or lived in an unendurable climate, or 
 were too much addicted to Portuguese rum and stewed 
 dog to be desirable spouses. 
 
 Then it was that the American privateer reluctantly 
 turned her helm to the waters of the New World, and 
 bore down upon the King of Hu-kiwauka, young, hand- 
 some, and more or less unmarried. His dominions were 
 a trifle bigger than the British Isles, the climate was 
 delightful, and oranges and bananas grew of their own 
 accord. She came, saw and conquered : married the 
 dusky monarch, and made him a small allowance. She 
 was careful to retain the control of her own money, 
 preferring in her own phrase, u to run the whole show 
 herself" ; and had whitewashed the entire island with 
 the blessings of civilization, and was beginning to lay on 
 the elements of morality with a thick brush, when it 
 occurred to her that her son required some more extensive 
 preparation for his future power than could be furnished by 
 her own misty reminiscences of Miss MangnalVs Questions 
 (sections Politics and History). So she ordered a couple 
 of hundred rolls of calico to provide for the natural growth 
 of population during her absence, only regretting that she 
 had no time to carry out her great scheme for supplying 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 93 
 
 all adult citizens with Aerated Coffins at a reduced rate 
 on the monthly hire system ; she locked up the Crown 
 Jewels and put the key in her purse, graciously permitted 
 her husband to kiss her gloved hand, warned him against 
 playing poker too freely with the German storekeeper at 
 the harbour, and reminded him that the presence of his 
 epaulettes was no excuse for the absence of his trousers 
 when he received the British and American admirals at 
 his levee ; then she took her passage for San Franciso and 
 in due course reached Eton. There were rumours of a 
 solemn visit paid in state to Her Majesty at the Castle, 
 and it pleased Peter Frank to relate that the young 
 potentate of the South had in accordance with royal 
 etiquette kissed his sister-sovereign on either cheek ; but 
 about the truth of this story the Shiny Fag held his 
 peace. 
 
 I hardly know how he came to be called the Shiny 
 Fag. Bucklebury used to say that Shani was a part of 
 one of his many Heathen names, and the only one that 
 an English tongue could circumvent. His full title was 
 too complicated for use on week-days the only one in the 
 school-list that occupied three lines. At any rate the 
 name was appropriate to his shiny olive face and glossy 
 black hair : not to mention the unvarying smartness of 
 his hat and tie and boots and other raiment. 
 
 He knew no Greek and very little Latin ; so they 
 placed him in Lower Fourth. But if his mind had been 
 neglected, his physical accomplishments were many and 
 various. Before he had been at Eton a week he passed in 
 swimming ; his tattooed chest and shoulders created 
 a considerable sensation when first he stripped at Cuckoo 
 
94 THE SHINY FAG. 
 
 Weir, and when he entered the water with a double 
 somersault off the Acropolis, his success in the best circles 
 of Lower-boy society was assured. He spoke very good 
 English with a slight American accent ; he could also 
 jabber his native tongue with great fluency and force, and 
 used it freely for the purpose of "slanging" the Brocas 
 cads : for which it is admirably suited, the Hu-kiwaukans 
 being a seafaring people and wont to encourage the crews 
 of their war-canoes with the foulest imprecations. Indeed 
 some of his victims used to complain that it gave him an 
 unfair advantage ; for he could defeat them, cut and 
 thrust, in their own Billingsgate and then follow up his 
 victory with a volley of abuse which was the more 
 stinging because it was so utterly incomprehensible. He 
 soon distinguished himself in the football field, where the 
 hardness of his head made him the terror of his adversaries' 
 abdomens in a rouge ; he could run like a greyhound, and 
 his war-whoop at the close of a paperchase was a sound 
 to hear and tremble at. It is recorded that one laggard 
 hare whom he captured near the Butts, (having vague 
 notions of geography, and supposing the Hu-kiwaukans 
 to be nearly related to the Red Indians of fiction) 
 incontinently fell on his knees and prayed for mercy, in 
 the expectation of being scalped upon the spot, if not 
 roasted at a slow fire. 
 
 The odd thing was that his masters all liked him, 
 although he was a most incorrigible nuisance, always to 
 the fore in every kind of devilry, whether it was pinning 
 scrolls of paper to his neighbour's coat, or improvising 
 darts with quill pens, or enticing his tutor's tame yellow 
 dog into Lower Chapel, in the hope that the said 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 95 
 
 Crocodile would bite the master who tried to turn him 
 out a result which he did achieve in the end at the cost 
 of a flogging. He could draw rather well, and was fond 
 of making subtle caricatures on his shirt-cuff, and many a 
 master has been puzzled to know the cause of the laughter 
 around him, until he discovered how rapidly that shirt- 
 cuff vanished under the coat-sleeve on his own approach. 
 Lower-boys still tell how on one occasion he " scored off 
 the beak," who saw his pencil suspiciously active. 
 
 " Boy," said his instructor. " Boy, what are you doing 
 with that pencil ? " 
 
 " Drawing a picture, sir." 
 
 " Hand it up to me." 
 
 " Yes, sir ; " and with a grave face the Shiny Fag rose 
 and removed his coat and waistcoat. He was beginning 
 very deliberately to undo his braces and tie, when the 
 voice from the desk thundered out again 
 
 " Boy, what are you doing now ? What do you mean 
 by this impertinence, sir ? " 
 
 " Why, sir, you told me to pass the picture up to you, 
 and, as it's on my shirt-cuff " 
 
 His instructor glared knives and mustard ; he took a 
 scrap of paper and began to scribble a note to my tutor 
 that would have made the offender's life a burden to him 
 for a month to come and broken his spirit on the wheel 
 of perpetual Penal Servitude (or confinement in pupil- 
 room). The Shiny Fag saw this, so his manner changed 
 on the instant from defiance to apology. " Oh ! didn't 
 you mean that, sir ? I beg your pardon, sir. I'm 
 awfully sorry, sir." By the time the master looked up, 
 he had shuffled on coat and waistcoat again and was 
 
96 THE SHINY FAG. 
 
 sitting with his usual impudent grin modified to a win- 
 some smile. It was a young master, this, and his heart 
 had not yet had time to grow hard. A labouring man 
 becomes horny about the hands ; a clergyman becomes 
 horny about the knees ; a rowing man becomes horny 
 after his kind ; and a teaching man is very apt to grow 
 horny about the heart. Happily nature has provided 
 for most of them a softening plaster in the shape of wife 
 and children. It is an indisputable fact that a married 
 man is more merciful than a bachelor, but above all, 
 my dear brethren, beware of a master who is in love ; 
 he is more to be feared than a bear with the tooth-ache ; 
 should you but upset an inkpot, or offer your neighbour 
 a place at fives, without the smallest compunction he will 
 tear you limb from limb ; afterwards he will kick your 
 hat about the floor, and complain of you for inattention. 
 But this was a very young master, and at this moment 
 he was not in love ; so after looking stedfastly upon the 
 Shiny Fag for the space of a minute, and, finding his 
 good-humour irresistible, he only laughed and said, " If 
 you'll bring me next school the word shirt written in 
 twenty-five different languages, I won't complain to your 
 tutor. 1 ' With the help of South Sea dialects the Shiny 
 Fag performed the task, and escaped the torments of 
 Penal Servitude. 
 
 This smile of his often served him in good stead. 
 Buck used to call Lidney by the musical name of 
 Thunderguts. Before the Shiny one had been at Eton a 
 month he made a bet that he would call Lidney 
 Thunderguts to his face ; which he did, and then apolo- 
 gised so sweetly and profusely that Lidney, who was 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 97 
 
 weak-minded enough for anything, let him off. At 
 another time he earned quite a reputation for making 
 buttered toast. How we laughed when we discovered 
 that the kitchen-maid had relieved him of this part of 
 his duties for love of his handsome face and impudent 
 tongue. But if anyone would not be subdued by his 
 smiles, he was always ready to subdue him with his fists ; 
 and soon of very sturdiness proved himself a power at 
 school, as he will hereafter in the politics of the Southern 
 Hemisphere. If one Lower-boy cannot trouble the 
 waters in an Eton house for good or for evil, my story is 
 not true. 
 
 He soon learned to hold his own in the house, where 
 the feud between him and one Turke was for a whole 
 School-time the only topic of conversation. Turke was 
 a big Lower-boy, Captain of the the Fags, and something 
 of a despot. The Shiny Fag however was deeply versed 
 in all the wiles of savage warfare, and he taught his 
 comrades to rally to the watchword of " Turke ! Turke ! " 
 from whatever quarter it might come ; so that whenever 
 Turke tried to chastise any of his pigmy foes, the victim 
 raised the war-cry, and a dozen allies came rushing in, 
 tumbled the oppresser over, and sat on his head until he 
 promised submission. Their enmity was accentuated by 
 the fact that they occupied adjoining rooms. For several 
 weeks a sort of Guerilla warfare went on ; but the Shiny 
 Fag's native cunning generally enabled him to " go one 
 better " than his antagonist. Turke amused himself one 
 morning by emptying a jug of cold water over the Shiny 
 one as he lay asleep ; the Shiny discovered that Turke 
 slept with his mouth open, and he stole in the next 
 
 
98 THE SHINY FAG. 
 
 morning and popped between his teeth a wedge-shaped 
 plug of soap. After that Turke retaliated by concealing 
 under the Shiny's bed an alarum, that woke him up at 
 midnight ; whereupon the Shiny Fag got up, dressed, and 
 bored a hole through the wall into Turke's room ; he 
 passed a piece of string through this hole, and then crept 
 with catlike steps into Turke's chamber, and arranged an 
 ingenious mechanical contrivance on the top of his cup- 
 board ; he took Turke's hat-box and placed inside it an 
 empty biscuit-tin, and attached a fork to the string, letting 
 it dangle inside the biscuit-tin. Then he retired to his 
 own room, barricaded the door, and began to pull the 
 string and wait for results ; he could hear faintly through 
 the wall the noise made by the fork as it frisked about 
 inside the tin ; he could also hear Turke's imprecations 
 as he tramped round the room in search of the monster 
 that tormented him ; and he spent several hours very 
 comfortably in waking up Turke whenever he dropped 
 off to sleep. Of course with the morning light Turke 
 discovered the origin of the mysterious tinkling, and 
 made a terrific onslaught, happily in vain, on his enemy's 
 barricaded door. Then he planned revenge. He was 
 skilled in all the best varieties of booby-traps, ranging 
 from the small portcullis of dictionaries above the door 
 to the full-sized Niagara of baths, boxes, and jam-pots full 
 of damp flour ; but as his last experiment of this kind 
 had almost resulted in the death of the matron, he 
 abjured booby-traps and contented himself with cutting 
 buttons off the Shiny Fag's Sunday trousers ; whereupon 
 the Shiny Fag took all the Turkey's boots and smeared 
 them over inside and out with marmalade. The Turkey 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 99 
 
 flamed with rage, and put a brigade of clothes-brushes in 
 the Shiny Fag's bed. The Shiny Fag repaid the compli- 
 ment with fine gravel ; but the Turkey thought that he 
 had won a brilliant victory when he strewed an armful of 
 careful selected nettles between his adversary's sheets. 
 For a week, for a fortnight, the Shiny made no sign ; he 
 only pondered deeply, and gave an extensive order at 
 Bailey's, the beast-bird-and-bug-shop. Then, one night 
 when time enough had elapsed to allay suspicion, a great 
 cry was heard towards the time of the putting out of 
 lights, and the Turkey was found writhing in bed on the 
 top of twelve hedgehogs, about twice as many grass-snakes, 
 and a muzzled ferret. 
 
 After that Turke saw that the Shiny Fag was not to 
 be trifled with, and they made peace over a Genoa cake. 
 
 The Shiny Fag's worst fault was that, like all savages, 
 he was an inveterate liar ; he had no notion of speaking 
 truth for truth's sake, except to his mother and that for 
 prudential reasons : the Queen of Hu-kiwauka was 
 muscular as she was beautiful, and had thought nothing 
 of whipping the Crown Prince with her own fair hands ; 
 after one experience of her riding-whip he never lied to 
 her again. But at Eton things were different ; so he 
 gained quite a reputation by playing at bricks with words, 
 and kept a handkerchief stained here and there with red 
 ink for the purpose of going out of school when his nose 
 bled. One day a friend of his shirked early school, and 
 the Shiny Fag was sent to get his excuse ; in due time 
 he returned, and the praepostor-book bore the inscription, 
 " COKER : Blind Staggers. J. Endor" Now the 
 official diseases known to the authorities are restricted to 
 
ioo THE SHINY FAG. 
 
 Cold, Measles, Mumps, Hurt at Football, Sprained 
 Thumb, Tonsilitis, and Friday Fever, and for a time the 
 School Office was in a state of fermentation over the 
 unprecedented character of Coker's excuse ; still, the 
 experienced eyes of the Sergeant and the Messenger could 
 detect no flaw, and it was only when some suspicious 
 circumstances cropped up in connection with the sig- 
 natures on a certain white ticket that we put two and 
 two together and perceived that the Shiny Fag was an 
 experienced forger. 
 
 Fortunately his fagmaster, Bucklebury, got wind of 
 the matter, and talked to him very seriously ; and, as 
 the Shiny Fag had developed an affection for his lord 
 that already amounted to a religion and was rapidly 
 accumulating a mythology touching some of Buck's 
 bygone feats on flood and field, he promised that he 
 would never again tell a lie or forge a signature or do 
 anything shady except to save another fellow's life ; it 
 does not appear why he insisted on making this exception. 
 
 The fact was that his devotion to Buck became almost 
 oppressive ; he made him his pattern in every respect. 
 Buck walked with a rolling gait ; the Shiny Fag walked 
 like an intoxicated mariner. Buck wore woolly coats 
 with chessboard buttons ; the Shiny Fag ordered a 
 woolly Eton jacket with chessboard buttons. Buck had 
 sporting pictures and old china on his walls ; the Shiny 
 Fag made large purchases of sporting pictures and old 
 china. Buck kept on his mantel-piece certain photo- 
 graphs of young ladies in languishing attitudes and low 
 dresses. " Who are these ? " asked the Fag, one night ; 
 he knew nothing of actresses. 
 
THE SHINY FAG. 101 
 
 Now Bucklebury knew that his henchman's first step 
 would be to buy a similar set of portraits for his own 
 mantel-piece, if he found that they could be bought for 
 money ; and he also knew that such photographs were 
 anathema in the eyes of his tutor, who had never objected 
 to Buck's only because he regarded Buck as an incorrigible. 
 So, not wishing his fag to gain a reputation for depravity, 
 he determined to violate the principle which he had just 
 instilled so carefully into the young savage's mind, and 
 answered in an off-hand manner, " Those ? Oh, those are 
 my sisters." 
 
 u They're not much like you, 1 ' said the Shiny Fag, 
 dubiously. " What are their names ? " 
 
 " Violet and Marion," answered Buck, this time with 
 perfect truth. 
 
 " They're very pretty. But why's this one got Violet 
 Cameron under her picture ? " 
 
 " Cameron's her other Christian name, " said the 
 unhappy fagmaster, feeling the meshes of his own lies 
 closing round him. 
 
 " And is Marion Hood the other one's Christian 
 name ? " 
 
 " Yes ! " said Buck, all the more solemnly because 
 Witstock was choking with laughter on an ottoman in a 
 dark corner. " But go away now. I'm busy." 
 
 Then he threw the photographs into the fire, and asked 
 Witstock what on earth he was laughing at. For a time 
 he watched them burning. " Tell you what," he said 
 presently. " I shall have to turn a good boy." 
 
 And he did. 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 K-njjia e's dei. 
 
 " I know that wine has played the Infidel, 
 and robbed me of my robe of honour : well, 
 I only wonder what the vintners buy 
 one half so precious as the stuff they sell ! " 
 
 OMAR KHAYYAM. 
 
 WE were sitting on the passage sock-cupboard after 
 dinner. Peter Frank came lumbering up the 
 stairs with a large hamper and a pleased grin on his 
 greasy face, and I think the sight of him awoke recol- 
 lections of very small beer, and very little beef, and lots 
 of suet pudding, and reams and reams of my Tutor's 
 platitudes the thought of the former on this baking 
 afternoon were soothing, the latter irresistible any 
 way, I felt sleepy, and laid my head very lovingly 
 on the Member's shoulder (he was next me and 
 Buck was beyond him) and dozed off quite comfortably : 
 the Member is always good to his friends. My 
 Tutor's conversation at dinner would open the eyes of 
 a few of our peaceful, plodding, pettifogging statesmen 
 who drone away their dull official lives in the dust and 
 gloom of Downing Street with a bundle of red tape in 
 one hand and a volume of Hansard in the other ; what is 
 the joy of their life compared with ours ? Every day we 
 have a social and political revolution ; every other day 
 we throw in a gigantic European war. The wreck my 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPPIANT. 103 
 
 Tutor has prophetically brought about is hideous to con- 
 template ; dynasties unseated, thrones tottering, war- 
 worn generals struggling like sick rabbits into distant 
 climes, tired statesmen crying like infants over blasted 
 schemes that a calf or a Socialist would not have been 
 guilty of : we do things on a princely scale at dinner 
 the cabbage always excepted. T have often been set 
 thinking by these internecine homilies, and puzzled my 
 my brains to discover why my Tutor is so outrageously 
 bloodthirsty, because after all, beneath his Philology and 
 his little bald head, there still lurk the glimmerings of a 
 distorted common-sense : I believe that if Kinnoul didn't 
 divide his time between hoarsely cursing the butler for 
 not getting him enough beer and winking at the pretty 
 boys' maid who hands the potatoes, Europe would enjoy 
 greater rest and my Tutor would have less to repent of at 
 evening prayers. 
 
 " Shove that maundering ass off the cupboard," I heard 
 Buck command the Member ; but I was too quick for 
 him, and sat bolt upright with a military precision that 
 would have delighted Witstock's heart, had he been there 
 to see ; but he had sent the Shiny Fag for his hat the 
 moment dinner was over and had rushed out with his 
 most important air to interview the Sergeant-Major in 
 the Orderly Room. 
 
 Peter Frank was still there. I never knew such a man 
 to talk as Peter Frank ; you can't pass the pantry at any 
 hour of the day without his popping out to tell you that 
 it's going to be fine or it's going to rain or it's going to be 
 dull ; when you are perspiring at six fifty-five in a shirt 
 and frantic hopes of getting to Tardy Book in time, he 
 
io 4 BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 will tap gently at your door till you make some sort of 
 ejaculation, then he pokes a fragrant head round the 
 corner and says, " 'Ot water this mornin', sir ? Grand 
 mornin', this sir ! " till the room hardly contains you, 
 and when the clock strikes and you find time to kick him 
 downstairs he looks aggrieved. 
 
 I remember once I was hurrying off to school with my 
 Thucydides half-learnt, my waistcoat unbuttoned, and 
 my mind generally unhinged ; it happened to be the 
 morning of the Boat Race ; I had met Ixworth in Pop 
 three weeks before, and planked all my worldly goods on 
 Cambridge, and now it was five to one on Oxford and all 
 over bar shouting ; I rushed down the steps in time to 
 see the tail-end of my division straggling beyond the 
 Cannon, but just as I reached the bottom, Peter Frank, 
 his red waistcoat heaving with suppressed emotion, 
 blocked up the doorway ; his ingenuous face wore an 
 expression of intense mystery, and he beckoned to me to 
 return. I thought of important telegrams, dying grand- 
 mothers, importunate widows everybody and everything 
 but the truth ; I hardly thought even Peter Frank was 
 capable of such black infamy as that, so I dashed up the 
 steps again, abandoned all hopes of being in time for 
 school, and drew up in front of that dark imp of a flunkey. 
 He gravely put his face close to my ear. " Cambridge '11 
 win, sir," was what he said. 
 
 This time the aristocratic Buck deigned to be con- 
 descending. " What have you got there?" he asked in 
 a tone that seemed at once an insult to Peter Frank's 
 loquacity and a passive tribute to his own kind- 
 heartedness. 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 " Two and a 'arf brace best Egyptian feather-tailed 
 four-footed Cockyolly Birds," returned the youth, who was 
 quite sharp enough to see that Buck's unwonted familiarity 
 was only the result of two helpings of suet, and to be 
 valued accordingly ; and with that he passed on. 
 
 Buck's lip curled : Ixworth's unexpected smile brightened 
 into a chuckle : " My poor Buck," he murmured ; and then 
 the good old chap thought he might have wounded the 
 President's feelings, and in his simple, childlike way tried 
 to make amends. " By the way," he said, " talking about 
 hampers, what became of that one that you had a long 
 time ago, full of dynamite or whiskey or something, 
 which made old Endor shirt so fearfully ? You know 
 the one I mean ? " 
 
 The President grunted steadily for two minutes. We 
 surmised the story was coming. 
 
 The President, at the end of two minutes, swung his 
 leg with a mighty crash against the cupboard and said 
 gruffly, " Shove up ! " 
 
 We knew the story was coming. 
 
 " When that dry bob at the end gives me a little more 
 room I'll begin," he said. The drybob makes a point of 
 never arguing with an angry man ; though Buck had got 
 more than half the sock-cupboard to himself he went and 
 meekly balanced himself on the edge. And then the 
 Black Furies were appeased and the story really did 
 begin : 
 
 " About three halves ago that Band-struck idiot 
 Witstock (the Member nudged me here, and murmured, 
 " He'll be all right presently ") was only a Corporal, and 
 we heard none of the rot about Certificates of Proficiency 
 
io6 BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 and patent rifles with which he deluges us now that's 
 
 all developed itself since they made him a fourth-rate 
 lieutenant, bad scran to 'em : in fact he was a very decent 
 sort of fellow. 
 
 Well, he had just been told to steer the Victory, and 
 was hopping about like a half-ripe gooseberry on stilts for 
 joy, and blowing an infernal post-horn half the night in 
 order to let off some of his enthusiasm, so somebody in 
 desperation suggested that he had better give us a sock- 
 supper, just to commemorate the event. I can see old 
 Witstock's face at this moment ; his beady little eyes 
 simply glistened with pleasure ; he went up to the fellow 
 I forget who it was, Pooch I think, that specimen 
 who eats all day long and who would barter his soul for a 
 strawberry mess and said quietly, " Shake hands."' And 
 they shook hands. 
 
 We were all in the Vice's room at the time ; the bell 
 had rung hours before, but we'd just time to settle 
 the business before my tutor's tramp was heard (he'd 
 abandoned the list slippers as being liable to throw him 
 going down stairs) and we were all bottled. 
 
 " House business, sir," says the Vice as cool as a 
 cucumber ; you know my tutor allows meetings after the 
 bell on house business, and as Pooch said, if a sock-tea 
 isn't house business, what in the name of Crumpets is ? 
 
 But my tutor was not going to be done ; he came back 
 to the charge. u Why late for lock-up, Witstock ? " 
 
 " Because I wasn't in time, sir." My tutor didn't turn 
 a hair. " Why not in time ? " u I was walking up, sir" 
 replies the Vice, beginning to take off his trousers, as if 
 he considered that sufficient excuse, and would be glad 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 107 
 
 if my tutor would be so good as to shut the door 
 and go. 
 
 As you fellows know, " I was walking up," is now 
 proverbial. I waited till I heard my tutor on the bottom 
 passage shouting his usual, u Now then, are we all leaping 
 into bed ? Make 'aste, make 'aste ! " and then I went 
 back to the Vice's room to tell him of a happy thought 
 that had occurred to me : I had been a bit seedy before 
 this, and my Doctor (he's a grand man to look at, but 
 wants seasoning) had ordered me port ; it was to arrive 
 from home in a few days, and it seemed to me that if we 
 could use it in honour of the Vice's appointment it would 
 be more than well drunk. Of course it would be rather 
 hard to smuggle it up, because that beast Grice is so nippy 
 about drinks, and doesn't like to forego his legal right to 
 fifty per cent, of the stuff you're given, but I imagined 
 that if it came to the point the Vice could diddle even 
 a Boy's Maid in Butler's clothing. So I went and 
 confided in the Vice. He listened to the end, and then 
 all he said was, l Trust me. What's the Saying lesson ?' " 
 
 " That's just his style," grunted Ixworth. 
 
 " To tell you the truth at the time I didn't think even 
 the Vice was quite cute enough to keep half-a-dozen 
 black bottles in his room without being nailed : you 
 know how the Endor dives into the arcana of one's 
 burry under the specious pretext of counting the washing ; 
 not even a toothbrush is safe from my tutor when he 
 comes on one of his book-hunting expeditions ; and to 
 make matters worse the Vice was his Boys' Maid's avowed 
 foe because he once suggested, in her hearing, that 
 Kinnoul had a face like a dissolute Turk. 
 
io8 BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 " Then where was you when good looks was give out ? " 
 asked the lady hotly : and the natty little Vice has never 
 forgiven her. So the whole phalanx of authority 
 administrative, executive, and sneakative, was arrayed 
 against him, and he didn't seem to have the ghost of a 
 chance ; and so I told him. 
 
 The Vice looked at me very quietly, just as he does 
 when his going to sit on some wretch in the Debating 
 Society, sat down in his easiest chair, and gave me a most 
 tremendous jaw. 
 
 " Haven't you been long enough in this place," he said, 
 a to have learnt that people get on and do what they want 
 and are thought good fellows and become social demi- 
 gods, not by any positive power of their own, but 
 negatively by making use of their friends' weaknesses I 
 don't mean that they take advantage of them, but they 
 show that they are a little bit ahead of their friends in 
 some one particular, and if a fellow even begins to look 
 up to you, you can do pretty much what you like with 
 him. 
 
 "It's like a chain ; the whole may be very strong except 
 one little link : most people have a weak link hovering 
 about somewhere in their mental constitution, and if you 
 can catch hold of it the chain's in your power. The fellow 
 who has the knack of spotting weak links practically has 
 the school in his power ; because then the strongest and 
 the weakest are on the same dead level of inferiority, and 
 the nobodies who have no strong links nor any weak 
 ones either are not worth troubling about. 
 
 " Don't get bored, I'm coming to the point soon. 
 
 " Grice, as you know, is as wily as a Persian cat in the 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT, 109 
 
 matter of drinks and tips, but the Endor only beats him 
 by a short neck for consequential pomposity. He has an 
 idea that he is an ex officio guardian of house morals ; 
 that Butlering and Beneficent Badgering go together, 
 and that my Tutor's would come to a full stop if he 
 didn't constitute himself a sort of perpetual Semi-colon. 
 You can see that from the way he greasily insinuates 
 himself under my Tutor's nose when some poor devil has 
 come in half-an-hour late for lock-up ; he glories in being 
 able to show his zeal for our welfare and his respect for 
 the eternal verities by putting him down on the slate five 
 minutes later than he really was. 
 
 " Now I intend to take ad vantage, of this amiable trait 
 in our mutual friend Grice's character. A man of such 
 bestial proclivities can be surprised by some sudden shock 
 to his highly-strung moral fibres into doing things that 
 he would be ashamed of over a quiet glass of beer in the 
 pantry with plenty of time for reflection ; it is the way 
 with such animals. 
 
 " So don't you distress yourself this journey ; if Grice 
 doesn't run away with the proverbial maccaroon as 
 Mr. Grimwig says, Til eat my head.' " 
 
 I was so taken aback by the Vice's energy, which 
 usually confines itself to the tying of ties and the enlist- 
 ment of recruits, that I slunk out of the room without 
 another word. 
 
 To cut a long story short, the hamper came about two 
 days afterwards, addressed to me of course full of Fine 
 Old Crusted, and as heavy as lead. 
 
 I told the Vice, as we went into eleven o'clock school, 
 and saw the booty lying at the bottom of the stairs, that 
 
no BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 its weight alone would tell the tale, if nothing else. 
 " Grice will have to carry it up, old man," he said with a 
 wicked smile ; and carrying hampers up to the top of 
 my Tutor's is no child's play. Of course we met the 
 butler on the way. He came out of his den grinning 
 evilly, with that half-smile lurking about the corners of his 
 mouth that blossoms out into an honest grin towards 
 the end of the half, and shrivels up into a malevolent 
 leer when you curse him for a low swine : u 'Amper for 
 you, sir," he said greasily. " 'Eavy one, too, sir ; plenty 
 of sock there, sir," he added in a tone that seemed to wish 
 to convey more than the words themselves expressed. 
 
 The Vice chuckled grimly ; I tried to muster up all 
 my severity. 
 
 " You'd better take it up to Mr. Witstock's room " : 
 (we had just begun to mess together then) ; and with 
 that we walked out. 
 
 After school the Vice proceeded to " lay the trail," as 
 he put it. First he went to his room. The hamper was 
 lying innocently in the middle of the floor ; little wisps 
 of straw poked out from under the cover : " wouldn't 
 deceive a policeman," said the Vice. Then to me : ''Now 
 you just play at being Samson for a minute or two, and 
 sit against that door, because if anyone comes in we're 
 done ! " 
 
 So while I kept the door he opened the hamper, took 
 out all the bottles there were eight of them, I think 
 and shoved them into that patent ottoman that he made 
 at the Workshop, which has a secret cupboard in front 
 reeking of pipes, Bohn, and all uncleanness, while the 
 ordinary common or garden part of the affair is crammed 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. in 
 
 with the Vice's best clothes and all the pious literature he 
 can rescue from the House Library : the neatest thing 
 you ever saw. When he'd piled all the bottles safely 
 away, he went to his sock-cupboard and brought out a 
 small battalion of jam-pots, some of them full, some of 
 them empty ; he carefully packed these up in the straw 
 that he'd taken off the bottles and stowed them neatly 
 away in the hamper, which he tied up, as it had been 
 when it arrived. 
 
 I began to catch a glimmering of his meaning now. 
 
 " We've doubled," said the Vice, sweating with his 
 labours : " now we've got to put them on the heel scent ; 
 you can open the door. Owl I " 
 
 This last polite remark was bestowed on me because I 
 was mooning into space with my hand clutching the 
 door-handle ; the dodge seemed to me clumsy and poor 
 compared with the most of the Vice's contrivances, and I 
 suppose it was the despondency in my face that made the 
 Vice go on : u that's only Scene I. As easy as kicking 
 someone else's hat into a ditch : Scene II. is a trifle more 
 difficult. What sort of a woman is Leghorn ? " I hadn't 
 the faintest notion what Leghorn had to do with the 
 business, but I replied that Leghorn was a charming 
 woman, a quite delightful woman when you know her ; 
 but like the lady (or gentleman, I forget which) in the 
 song, u you had to know her fust." 
 
 " Suppose we go and talk to her like fathers," suggested 
 Witstock. So we went up higher, and found Leghorn, 
 whose only weaknesses are an affection for Kinnoul and a 
 contempt for constituted authority, sorting linen and 
 audibly grumbling. I never saw the Vice at fault for more 
 
ii2 BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 than a minute : he was on to the line as quick as old 
 Traveller in his best days. " Isn't the Endor an old 
 darling ? " he murmured softly. " Old Fiddlestick ! " 
 shouted Leghorn, " messing about 'ere, and prying into 
 what don't concern her there ; what with one thing and 
 another its work, work, work, fust thing in the mornin' 
 to the last thing at night ; it's more than mortial flesh 
 and blood can stand, it is ! " 
 
 Meanwhile the Vice had left me to bear the burden and 
 heat of Leghorn's passionate outburst ; he had strolled off 
 to her private cupboard where all the brushes and brooms 
 are kept and where we shut up the Member last half, and 
 his voice came across the troubled waves of air, still 
 fretting under the burden of woman's wrath, like the notes 
 of a lute stealing over ruffled waters. " Leghorn, what's 
 in this bottle of yours ? " 
 
 " The Fluid," replied Leghorn tersely. 
 
 44 Yes, of course," said the Vice gently, " but what 
 Fluid ? " " Condign Fluid, to be sure ; what else did 
 you suppose it was?" "Is it good for killing rats?" 
 came the mellow voice again. Leghorn hazarded a smile ; 
 the Vice's innocence had about driven Endor out of her 
 head. 
 
 u I wish you'd lend it me," he went on ; " because the 
 rats in my room are fearfully bad ; I have been in the 
 habit of interrupting their orgies by dashing the coal- 
 scuttle violently against the ground, but the fellow 
 beneath objects to that, and says it wakes him ; and I 
 really am at a loss to know what to do." Leghorn 
 surveyed the Vice admiringly : his boots were always 
 irreproachable. u You're a rum 'un," was all she said. 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 113 
 
 The words were rude, but the tone was almost affectionate ; 
 and, when the Vice walked off five minutes later with the 
 bottle under his arm, I knew he had won his game. 
 After six that same evening we were all sitting in Pooch's 
 room arranging the details of the sock-tea, which we 
 decided should be held in Pooch's domain, as he clearly 
 had a legal right to precedence where eatables were con- 
 cerned, and his fat face beamed with pleasure when I 
 hinted that my cellar should be placed at the disposal of 
 the company. " By the way," added the Vice carelessly, 
 " I left a bottle, like an ass, standing on the table in my 
 room ; I wish, Pooch, you'd go and put it away, or we 
 may get into a hobble ! " Then he winked mildly 
 at me. 
 
 The wretched Pooch came back in a blue funk ; he 
 said he'd explored the whole room, looked in the bed, 
 up the chimney, under the burry every likely place in 
 fact, but couldn't see a sign of it ; must have been taken 
 by somebody and the unconscious youth almost wept at 
 the extent of the common loss. Just then there was a 
 knock at the door : we all knew who it was. 
 
 " Come in, you imp of darkness," roared Witstock ; 
 and the Shiny Fag's wicked face appeared. 
 
 " Miss Endor wants to see you and Bucklebury," he 
 said, and then went. Pooch almost had a fit. 
 
 We went downstairs, and I never saw the Vice look 
 so pleased with himself ; " Do your best not to laugh," he 
 said as he opened the door. 
 
 The Endor was sitting in her most important attitude 
 in her most fashionable costume in her best chair : her 
 snow-white hair was gathered girlishly up d Vlmperatrice : 
 
 H 
 
1 1 4 BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 
 
 was she humming a refrain out of the last comic opera ? 
 No, she was not humming. 
 
 " Grice tells me, Bucklebury," she began, " that you had 
 a hamper full of wine sent you to-day ; at least, he 
 supposed it was wine, and when he found this bottle in 
 Witstock's room this afternoon he considered it his duty 
 to bring it to me and inform me that boys were secreting 
 contraband goods in their rooms." 
 
 The Endor actually tried to look severe ; it didn't 
 become her portly and girlish figure at all. The 
 * Condign ' stood on a side table, the picture of injured 
 innocence, and I could see the Vice was splitting inwardly ; 
 he began to twist his moustache by courtesy, but outwardly 
 he was very grave. " Are you quite sure, ma'am, he said 
 solemnly, " that that bottle" he pointed to the table 
 " contains wine ? Perhaps it would be best to clear up 
 that point before going any further ? " The Endor 
 looked hurt. " I have Grice 's authority," she said, u that 
 it contains claret ; he examined the bottle in my presence 
 and declared positively that it was claret ; and a butler 
 ought to know." 
 
 " He ought, indeed," replied the Vice sadly. 
 u But," went on the Endor amiably, " if you dispute 
 Grice's decision in this matter, you are at liberty to argue 
 the point with him," and she forthwith rang the bell and 
 ordered him up. The man looked distinctly sheepish 
 when he was confronted with us ; and it didn't improve 
 his personal appearance. " Grice, are you quite sure that 
 this is claret ?" asked the Endor, and passed the bottle. 
 The greasy man held it like a fox-terrier holds a rat. 
 " Claret, mum, quite sure of it." 
 
BACCHUS TRIUMPHANT. 115 
 
 And then we all looked at one another, and I waited 
 for the next move. Just at that second Leghorn came in 
 to lay the Endor's supper, and Witstock pricked up his 
 ears and snuffed the air like an old horse on a November 
 morning. " Perhaps Leghorn can throw some light on 
 this knotty question," he said sarcastically to the matron, 
 and then he turned to Leghorn, who was looking at Grice 
 with an evil smile, and said, " Do you remember lending 
 me a bottle " 
 
 "My Condign, sure alive ! " the woman broke out, and 
 then apologetically to the Endor, u You must know, 
 ma'am, that this morning Mr. Witstock he come to me 
 and wanted some stuff to kill the rats that he says do 
 keep him awake o' nights with their scrattin' ." 
 
 I don't think we waited for any more. The Vice burst, 
 the Endor's fashionable dress could hardly contain her, 
 and that beast Grice's face was a picture : I am not 
 certain, but I think he swore. As Peter Frank said after- 
 wards, u inventive genius such as that is thrown away on 
 a hordinary butler." And Pooch got his port after all." 
 
 " You've made me late for Absence," drawled the 
 Member ungratefully. 
 
 H 2 
 
THREE OLD FRIENDS. 
 
 WE had beaten my tutor's Old Boys by four goals 
 to a goal and a rouge (touched by a stout gen- 
 tleman of forty, who played in check trousers and a Jaeger 
 vest), and in the evening the B. B. Club held a feast of 
 reason and a flow of soul : that is to say Witstock ran- 
 sacked the passages for comfortable chairs, having broken 
 all his own in a recent rag, made us put on our gaudiest 
 blazers in his honour, and said he was going to read us a 
 paper. Ever since his election into the Literary Society 
 he had been going about with a preter naturally solemn 
 countenance, asking how soon he would be expected to 
 instruct and amuse the Society. We said that he would 
 unquestionably be called upon in a week or two. This 
 troubled him, for his experience of literary work was 
 limited to some contributions that he had occasionally 
 sent to a certain sporting journal ; and, as they were 
 never inserted, even this was no proof of great ability. 
 Now he had written an essay, and asked us to give him 
 our candid opinions. We said we would. 
 
 The Member had returned very full of shandygaff 
 from celebrating our victory in Tap, had floored an 
 enormous tea and devoured unlimited sausages, and now 
 he wooed sweet sleep in a corner. Bucklebury and I 
 hunted out a box of chocolates and resigned ourselves. 
 " One question," said Buck. il Are we to laugh or cry ? 
 My laugh is hung on a hair-trigger, and my tears are 
 

 
 THREE OLD FRIENDS. 117 
 
 simply hustling up the pipe. Is it tragic or comic ? 
 Neither ? Sail on, then." 
 
 The Vice said his paper was entitled " Three Old 
 Friends," and it was in three chapters, and the first was 
 
 YE RUSTICALL OR UNSCAVENGED. 
 
 " Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard." 
 
 SHAKSPERE. 
 
 IT was in a cupboard No, I think it was in that old 
 burry. The lumber-room, you know. On the left, at 
 the top of those old stone stairs, next to the housekeeper's 
 room. There was a cupboard there, I know. But I 
 think that it was in my grandfather's Eton burry I found 
 it, all among thick grey cobwebs and soft layers of dust 
 flue, do you call it ? Three hundred years old, it looked. 
 I wonder where he got it from. You would like to see 
 it ? Very well. 
 
 " Yea no we also there is the Rusticall and Unscavenged 
 Scholar, and he is the straungest of Alle. For ye shall 
 se that when he cometh fyrst to the School, he refuseth 
 to Washe himself by the Pumpe bodelye, as other Laddes 
 use. But he scrubbeth hys face aftre the Maner of 
 Dogges, driely, and wythout Watere. And so he becom- 
 eth of unclene Raimente and impure : nor wyll any 
 kynde of jeer, nipe, bobbe, pynche, or floute, move him 
 to dense hys bodye. For so, he saithe, by the Neg- 
 lectynge of hys skynne he shall the more thoroughly 
 purge his Soule. And though I wolde not be thoughte 
 to calle him a Liar, yet, as may I be well shryven, I do 
 misdoubt me of the Truthe of that. When he is yet of 
 Small Stature, he spredeth hys Face and Handes wyth 
 the Inke he so sorely grudges to hys Foolscappe : and 
 
n8 THREE OLD FRIENDS. 
 
 thus is he Unscavenged : lykewyse as he groweth oldere, 
 hys chynne is besete wyth bristlynge Haires, and yete 
 refuseth he to calle the College Barbere to hys Jowle : 
 and thus he is Rusticall : moreover, he is ofttimes bothe 
 Inkye and Unshaven, and so he is Unscavenged and 
 Rusticall bothe. 
 
 " None of your Poetes is he, But he is a Mathematikalle 
 Soule, knowynge not (Poore Foole !) that Mathematiks 
 are Sufferynges. Sometimes he blundereth saddely in 
 hys Latynne verse makynge, yet of so brave a Soule is 
 he, and suche a gallant, that if hys Master do but reprove 
 him (be he Pastor, Lawyer, Doctor of Divinitie, or even ? 
 as some Masters use, a Courtear) he ups wyth an Oathe, 
 rebukynge him, and Swearynge bie alle that is Malyg- 
 nante and Lieynge, that hys Master (Gret Scholer though 
 he be) can construe the Lynes if he lykes, but that he 
 lyketh not ; whereat hys fellow-scholers make much 
 laughtere, derydynge Boy and not Master, the whyche is 
 moste incomprehensible. And thys is no Lie that I tell 
 ye, but honeste, sobere, Truthe. 
 
 " Yea, and from want of manly Exercyse he groweth 
 ofttimes unto himselfe a gret Bellye, as the gretnesse of 
 an Hors the whyche also hys comrades mocke at when- 
 soever he taketh a Swymme in the River. And thys 
 Thynge he dothe not often, bie reason of the swyftnesse 
 of the Water and the Unkyndenesse of hys Compannyones, 
 who do moleste and irritate him when he stryppethe, that 
 he crieth out in the bytternesse of hys Soule, wyshynge 
 that he were moderatelye Fatte as other Menne. But 
 the Straungeste thynge of Alle I had almost forgot to telle 
 ye : howe that away from Schoole he setteth up to be as 
 
THREE OLD FRIENDS. 119 
 
 other Menne, onelye more so, Beynge a Boy : or at the 
 leaste he pretendeth so to be : for he is ever fulle of 
 Tayles anent hys gret Dedes at the London Play Houses : 
 how swete Polly Durden saide thys, and pretye Kit 
 Marlowe that : makynge himselfe out to be the gretest 
 of alle Gallantes, a verye Beau of Beaux, a man who 
 spendethe a Duke's Revenue at Tavernes and Supper- 
 houses ; drynkynge good Sac wythal, Whyte and 
 Redde : but I have news that thys is a Braggart Tayle : 
 and how the same befytteth the Rusticall and Un- 
 scavenged, I leave ye to judge." 
 
 " Your ancestor would seem to have had a prophetic 
 foreknowledge of our own Pooch," said the President. 
 " Give us some more." 
 
 Witstock resumed : 
 
 THE LITERARY ETONIAN. 
 
 " A very gentle beast and of a good conscience." 
 
 SHAKSPERE. 
 
 OT an uncommon type, the Literary Etonian. You 
 wish to see him in his natural state ? Then go to School 
 Library and examine the wooden steps there. Several 
 Specimens will be found adhering to the upper side ; 
 slightly dusty perhaps, and somewhat soiled sometimes 
 from exposure to various coloured inks and dust of torpid 
 tomes : but otherwise in good condition. Inspect with a 
 microscope. Now School Library is not what it was. 
 Neither is School Library what it will be. It wasn't what 
 it is, and it isn't what it will be : neither will it not be 
 what it wasn't : you can press that to any conclusion you 
 like. 
 
120 THREE OLD FRIENDS. 
 
 It was a lofty room once, at the end of New Buildings, 
 with four tables, two comfortable chairs, and twenty 
 uncomfortable stools. It had a roaring fire in winter, yet 
 it was never cold : it didn't have a fire in summer, and 
 yet it was never hot. People say it had a bad carpet : so 
 it had ; indeed, that was why it was pulled down. It was 
 really rather a nice place in summer : you could sleep 
 there better than anywhere else, and there were the 
 Provost's laburnums and acacias scenting the whole room 
 when the wind was east. And it had a cool stone gallery 
 running round the top, and a Dusty Dying Gladiator 
 lying round the bottom : there was a bust of Praed, and 
 a statue of a Fallen Angel. 
 
 At least, someone told me it was a Fallen Angel ; and 
 someone else said it was the Belvidere : " vich you please^ 
 my little dear," said the showman, " vich you please, you 
 pays your money, and you takes your choice." 
 
 Then there were two Charming Unicorns with Plaster 
 Noses : there were Revolving Globes, eminently adapted 
 for the illustration of Greek Racing : you spun the globes 
 round for pennies, and the globe that kept on longest 
 won. Above all there were ladders and steps. You could 
 climb up into the gallery from those steps, only the gallery 
 flagstones (they were flagstones ?) whitened your trousers. 
 And as for racing with them, it was simply wonderful. 
 We have heard that it is exhilarating to ride on engine 
 boilers, and that you verge on excitement when you drive 
 down the Matterhorn or the Jungfrau in a coach-and-six ; 
 but assuredly neither could equal the frenzy, if we may so 
 call it, of racing with a twelve-foot pair of steps across a 
 Library. 
 
THREE OLD FRIENDS. 
 
 121 
 
 Ah well ! tempora mutantur, and if you want to race 
 with a ladder now, you will find a Literary Etonian sitting 
 on the top ; and the moral of that is that you can't eat 
 your cake and have it too : because if all the ladders were 
 broken you couldn't have any Literary Etonians. 
 
 Thus much of the Library : and there would have been 
 less, if it was not the home of our hero. You have perhaps 
 heard of the late Simon Stylites : Simon is the Mahomet 
 of the Literary Etonian ; and his disciple imitates him by 
 living on a ladder. 
 
 The Literary Etonian is always on Tardy Book, for he 
 is as unpunctual as Reading Over. He writes articles for 
 Magazines in School, and wonders what the Hervey 
 Prize will be out of School ; unless he is entering for the 
 English Essay, when his reasoning becomes disjointed and 
 absent, and he babbles of Absolute and Relative Truth, 
 Comparative Insanity as an Attribute of Governing Bodies, 
 and the patent absurdity of there being Nothing New 
 under the Sun. For is not he himself an original creature, 
 a Licensed Poet, and an unchallenged solecist : his very 
 words, as expressed in his u Essay on Otherworldliness, or, 
 the Sphere of Self?" There is one thing he cannot do : 
 he cannot sing. . 
 
 Eventually he edits the Chronicle : that is perhaps the 
 summit of his ambition. Not invariably, however ; 
 sometimes he dismounts from even an Editor's Pegasus, 
 and mounting another winged steed, more flighty perhaps 
 and not such a good stayer, he writes a book. The public 
 may or may not buy it, but the really Literary Etonian 
 is satisfied either way. 
 
122 THREE OLD FRIENDS, 
 
 11 Now you ought to drink a glass of water," said the 
 Member, waking up. " They always do at the Literary 
 Society. I've seen 'em." 
 
 The Vice asked if we could stand another. One more, 
 we said. And he gave us 
 
 THE OUTLANDISH ETONIAN. 
 
 " Here comes a pair of very strange beasts, which in all tongues are 
 called fools." 
 
 SHAKSPERE. 
 
 WE all know him. Generally he has red hair always 
 a made-up tie. This he discards eventually for a thin 
 untidy thing which always shows the collar stud. 
 
 The Outlandish Etonian commonly makes most stir 
 when he arrives. This he accomplishes in a variety of ways, 
 usually by the extraordinary apparel which he adopts for 
 the occasion. The Outlandish One has, among others, 
 appeared in the following 
 
 i. A Frock Coat, and a Bowler with a coloured ribbon. 
 
 ii. White Flannel Trousers, a Norfolk Jacket, a Top 
 Hat, and a Butterfly net. 
 
 iii. A Kilt and Green Striped Stockings, tastefully set 
 off by a Yellow Tarn o' Shanter and a Plaid. 
 
 iv. Sailor Costume. This has frequently been noticed. 
 
 v. Simply attired in a Waterproof and a pair of canvas 
 Boating Shoes. Perhaps almost more frequent than the 
 last. 
 
 He gets the idea into his head that it is good to sing, 
 shout, and gesticulate frantically while paying the porter 
 who brings up his luggage by way of " showing those 
 chaps that he's not shy not much home-sickness about 
 him. Home-sick, indeed ! No, they shall soon find he's 
 

 THREE OLD FRIENDS. 123 
 
 got something in him." So he sings and whistles away, 
 thumps his packages about and knocks in a few nails, just 
 to test the quality of the walls and then he pauses, for he 
 hears someone talking outside. He listens, thinking to 
 catch some laudatory phrase, some approving criticism. 
 
 This is what he hears 
 
 " Well, I'll be jiggered." 
 
 " And I'll be blowed." 
 
 " What cheek ! " 
 
 " And only just come, too ! " 
 
 (Louder) 
 
 " What in the name of purple thunder are you doing 
 in there ? And why in the name of Spotted Moses are 
 you kicking up that fearful shindy ? And how the mis- 
 chief do you suppose we're going to do anything if 
 you " 
 
 Door opens. 
 
 The Outlandish Etonian says 
 
 " I say, you fellows, isn't it rather the thing, don't you 
 know, to smoke here ? I've got a thousand cigarettes 
 here, if " 
 
 Here he stops, as a look of blank astonishment came 
 slowly over his audience's faces. For this Outlandish 
 Etonian has selected No. 4 (Sailor Costume) to appear in. 
 Then 
 
 " O Lor." 
 
 " Holy Henry. Wonderfuller and Wonderfuller." 
 
 " O my goodness ! Well, I never did ! Did you ? " 
 
 The Outlandish Etonian says 
 
 " I say, you fellows, I've got some awfully good songs 
 here, you know. I'll sing one if you like." 
 
124 THREE OLD FRIENDS. 
 
 " He's going to sing ! I say, all you fellows, this new 
 fellow's going to sing." 
 
 The whole passage assembles. 
 
 Well, he sings. Not badly, either. Only, he doesn't 
 know why, his breath seems to be playing him all manner 
 of tricks, and he feels all hot about the cheeks, and 
 doesn't like to look up from his music. And he catches 
 now and then a smothered smile, till, at last 
 
 " That's enough for me." 
 
 " Well, Pm off, after that." 
 
 " Come along. But did you ever ? What an extra- 
 ordinary " 
 
 Door shuts. 
 
 Home-sick ? Well, rather. Only, poor boy, he didn't 
 know. Well, at all events they shan't know at home 
 about it. But how different an ending to what he had 
 hoped ! What brutes the fellows are ! What brutes ! 
 No, not brutes, exactly. Only small boys are always 
 thoughtless. Eton boys don't begin to think till they can 
 fag at least, that is my theory. Sometimes before that, 
 but often not till some time after. 
 
 Now then. We will suppose that he is a " Naturalist." 
 And we will suppose that he comes in the Summer Term. 
 
 The first thing that strikes him is the beauty of the 
 place. They say that it isn't till you leave Eton that you 
 really love her. Well, we doubt it. Anyhow, he goes 
 out for a walk his first Sunday. The Sallows are just 
 over, and the Elms are budding freely. There is a 
 thrush's nest in that one. No, a missel-thrush. Shall he 
 climb up ? 
 
 He climbs up. Four eggs, but not sitting. He takes 
 
TREE OLD FRIENDS. 
 
 125 
 
 one, and blows it up there. As he comes down, all green 
 and dripping (there was a shower while he was in Chapel) : 
 
 " My goodness, what an awful scug ! " 
 
 " Oh, I say ! What's your name, and where do you 
 board, and don't you know fellows never climb trees 
 here ? " 
 
 The Outlandish Etonian hangs his head. He didn't 
 know. Not climb trees ? How funny ! 
 
 Next Sunday he tries another direction through a 
 hayfield, we regret to say. Suddenly, by Jove, an 
 Orange Tip. Just what he wanted. 
 
 Off went his hat. He soon caught that Orange Tip, 
 scientifically killed it, and put it in an old match box he 
 found on a dust-heap. Hullo, two fellows coming along 
 the road. He instinctively listens. 
 
 " I say, did you see that fellow ? " 
 
 " No ; what was he doing ? " 
 
 " Running after a butterfly with his hat." 
 
 "Oh, good gracious, what a frightful scug." 
 
 But why ? 
 
 There is a moral to the Story of the Outlandish 
 Etonian. 
 
 " Witstock," said the President with unusual animation, 
 " you're a genius. A paper of that sort would be the 
 salvation of the Literary Society." 
 
 And I believe it would. But the Officers of the 
 Literary Society have not yet given him an opportunity 
 of effecting their salvation. When they see this perhaps 
 they will. 
 
THE STORY OF DAGON. 
 
 I. THE COMING MAN. 
 
 " He wears a clean collar, and smokes a cigarette ; that is how we 
 know he is a villain." 
 
 STAGELAND. 
 
 THE great Mr. GIBBON, who is (alas !) no longer with 
 us, has chronicled in pellucid prose the Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire. Fifteen hundred years 
 hence -some equally learned historian, knowing little of 
 the circumstances and less of the facts, may attempt an 
 equally gigantic task and paint in equally unfading 
 colours the Rise and Fall of the Tyranny of Alexander 
 Kinnoul. I, who was eye-witness of the whole, can only 
 sketch it, and that in rough outlines ; your true historian 
 requires distance and perspective. Otherwise he may 
 stumble upon the truth, which would never do. 
 
 Alexander Kinnoul was a mass of Scottish brawn. 
 From the very first he declined to learn anything what- 
 ever, and became the live embodiment of Matter without 
 Mind. Somehow or other he scrambled into Fifth Form : 
 but was so deeply engrossed by the study of the three 
 F's Fighting, Football, and Fives, that he never 
 thoroughly mastered the three R's. Had he pleased he 
 might have succeeded in Upper Club ; but professional 
 coaching savoured too much of oral instruction, and he 
 preferred to play cricket by the light of nature a very 
 dim light in his case. As a lower-boy he would sit idle 
 for hours in pupil-room staring with a frown of sulky 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 127 
 
 reproof at my tutor or with a meaningless grin at the 
 ceiling : thinking of his sins, said Buck : stringing 
 together lies for use during the day, said Witstock ; and 
 no power on earth could induce him to turn the pages of 
 a dictionary, much less to do a copy of Derivations 
 unaided. " Kinnoul," said my tutor to him one day, u I 
 wish you would thirst a little after knowledge ! " Kin- 
 noul looked up with a gleam of heavy humour under his 
 shaggy eyebrows. " Umph ! " he growled, in the deep 
 voice that he cultivated even in Eton jackets, " you 
 should see how I thirst after football. And the beer's 
 beastly." 
 
 But out of school he was no fool ; he went in for being 
 a ladies' man, and paid the very greatest attention to his 
 exterior which was only natural, as his prolonged in- 
 dulgence in what our ancestors euphemistically called 
 " strong waters " can have left him no interior worth 
 speaking of. The truth was infinitely less precious in his 
 eyes than were his trousers ; and to preserve his hat 
 stainless he would at any time have sacrificed his honour. 
 Therein he differed from his friend Pooch, who would 
 gladly have gone up town in a wall-sack, a surplice, a 
 pair of pyjamas, and a volunteer helmet, if there was but 
 a strawberry mess to be earned by so doing. Talk ? he 
 could talk for hours on certain subjects, and when his 
 hostess said, " Come and sit beside me and tell me all 
 about yourself," none so ready to respond to the call as 
 he. Kinnoul on anyone else was as likely as not a foul- 
 mouthed slanderer ; but Kinnoul on Kinnoul was a 
 fulsome eulogist, a brushed, starched, and scented Auto- 
 biography in many chapters. Chapter the First was 
 
128 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 headed Family History, Lineage, Power, and Wealth of 
 the House of Kinnoul ; he used to give us fragments of it 
 at dinner, with the regularity of clockwork, in the inter- 
 regnum between the meat and the pudding when the 
 boys' maid at whom he winked also with the regularity 
 of clockwork was out of the room ; and we should to 
 this day have been hearing about the glories of the Clan 
 Kinnoul, and the antiquity of the Kinnoul tartan, and 
 the extent of the Kinnoul deer-forests, had not Buckle- 
 bury pricked the bubble. Most bubbles at my tutor's 
 were pricked sooner or later by the sharp point of Buck's 
 sarcastic tongue. It was one night when Miss Endor 
 was talking very tenderly about Kinnoul ; her girlish 
 prattle was apt to become quite startlingly romantic after 
 a heavy supper and a mild game of bezique with three 
 lower-boys ; she said he was so aristocratic-looking. He 
 was certainly a fine specimen of the Human Animal ; he 
 had good features and a crop of curly hair which was called 
 " auburn " by Miss Endor, and " gowlden " by Mrs. 
 Leghorn, and " kerrots " by Peter Frank, and u marma- 
 lady " by Witstock, who always declined to use the same 
 vocabulary as the rest of the world. " I have it on good 
 authority," she said, " that there flows in his veins the 
 very best Scotch blood." 
 
 " Very best Scotch marmalade, you mean, ma'am," 
 corrected Buck in his driest tones, thinking of Witstock's 
 remark about the marmalade-coloured hair. 
 
 " An omen, an omen ! " cried someone. " KinnouVs 
 Marmalade, of course," and catching up a Graphic off 
 Miss Endor's table one of the papers which she was wont 
 to " convey " most feloniously from the House Library 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 129 
 
 he pointed to a well-known advertisement. " So much for 
 the noble house of Kinnoul." 
 
 Kinnoul raged and ramped when he heard of it wanted 
 to kill Bucklebury ; but he talked no more of the Clan 
 and the Tartan. The wonder was that he should have 
 taken the trouble to lie so heavily. Kinnoul senior was a 
 fine old gentleman with a pink face and pink tie, white 
 whiskers and white waistcoat ; Mrs. Kinnoul would have 
 passed as a charitable duchess, and the Miss Kinnouls were 
 fine, strapping girls with pretty faces and plenty of money. 
 Moreover, as Buck remarked, a man who makes good 
 marmalade is a public benefactor ; and no better marma- 
 lade than Kinnoul's (if you like it sweet) can be had for 
 money. 
 
 "Yes," said Witstock, more thoughtfully than usual. 
 u If that fellow is ashamed of the way his people made 
 their oof, he ought to be kicked. Why, my governor 
 began as a working blacksmith he died, you know, when 
 I was a kid and I'm proud of him, proud as they make 
 'era. Best business he ever did was when he invented the 
 patent Witstock vice that's why I like you fellows to 
 call me the Vice." 
 
 The First Chapter of Kinnoul's Autobiography was 
 closed : but there were others. There was Kinnoul the 
 All-round Sportsman, the sure grouse-shot " an old cock, 
 eighty yards off, going like the wind, and I dropped him 
 dead as mutton " the wily deer-stalker, the knowing 
 fisherman, the dashing rider. Once and only once did 
 Buck shut him up ; Kinnoul had been telling some 
 particularly tall stories at dinner, by way of keeping up 
 his reputation for being " the biggest liar that ever 
 
 I 
 
1 3 o THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 weighed a salmon," and his jackal (for by this time he 
 was swell enough to have a jackal a weak-kneed crock 
 whose only genuine vice was Photography) turned to him 
 and asked respectfully, " that must be about the heaviest 
 on record ? " 
 
 " Well," said Kinnoul, " to tell the truth " 
 
 u Yes," interrupted Buck in clear dry tones, " let's have 
 the truth just for once for a change." 
 
 The table heard, and the table roared ; Peter Frank 
 asserts that he saw a smile come stealing round the back 
 of my tutor's bald head like the ripple on a pond, and 
 even the jackal tittered : for which he got a kicking in 
 due season. 
 
 Yet it was very evident that Kinnoul could no longer 
 be suppressed as of old. How he hated the B. B. Club ! 
 When we showed signs of wearying under his sporting 
 reminiscences, he revenged himself by delivering a series 
 of discourses on the true art of tossing a caber, so direly 
 technical that we were glad to get back to our old diet of 
 Rider-Haggard-and-water. We saw with surprise that 
 he was becoming popular ; being a light-hearted loon he 
 set up for a private buffoon, and in the capacity as 
 collector and dispenser of sultry stories won his way into 
 the disreputable fringe which, at Eton as elsewhere, hangs 
 on the skirts of swelldom. Such fringes are apt to 
 become dirty ; and scavenging is an easy trade. 
 
 About this time his strength and courage began to be 
 talked about. He was walking one Sunday evening with 
 Pooch ; Kinnoul was big and butcherly, Pooch was greasy 
 and grocerous ; and in particular the colour of Kinnoul's 
 hair and the girth of Pooch's waistcoat made them a 
 
THE STORY OF DAGON. 131 
 
 conspicuous couple. In the purlieus of Chalvey they 
 encountered a gang of roughs, who greeted them with 
 derisive shouts of " Ello, ere's Marmalade and Stummick 
 arm-in-arm ! Yah, Colly-Oppers* ! " Pooch laughed, but 
 Kinnoul without a word of warning swung his umbrella 
 aloft and went for the crew of cads ; two or three bit the 
 earth beneath his onset, and the rest fled. Kinnoul gave 
 chase, singled out a big ruffian whose voice had been the 
 loudest, and rolled him over in the open ; then he took his 
 prey by the collar and proceeded to thrash him within an 
 inch of his life, while Pooch stood by with chattering 
 teeth and interceded. Pooch came home as pale as if he 
 had seen death ; " Kinnoul would have killed him," he 
 whispered, " only the brolly broke." 
 
 It was amazing to see how this somewhat paltry affair 
 increased his popularity, far more so than if he had broken 
 a shooting record on the range, or carried off an open 
 scholarship at Oxford. His former achievements were 
 remembered and magnified. " He has cleared School 
 Jump he has cleared it at the end of the Steeplechase 
 no, in half-change in a top-hat with an umbrella in his 
 hand in a greatcoat : let us bow down and do him 
 homage. He has made a magnificent leg-hit into Fellows' 
 Pond over Fellows' Pond into the river : let us raise 
 him on a pedestal and worship him. " Among the 
 common herd he began to be pointed out as a "coming 
 man," and even Lidney and others who were proud of 
 their discrimination professed to find Originality in his 
 
 * Colly-Oppers A facetious name, applied to the students of Eton 
 College by a light-hearted and youthful agricultural population : 
 obtained by coalescing the names Colleger and Oppidan. 
 
 I 2 
 
1 32 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 utter selfishness, Dry Humour in his surly demeanour, 
 and proclaimed upon the house-tops that he had Character, 
 u And a rotten bad character too," said the warning 
 voice of Buck ; but his counsels were lost in the clamour 
 of many false witnesses. The state of affairs was well 
 summed up by Witstock. " There is one Kinnoul, and 
 Lidney is his prophet and a dashed poor prophet at the 
 price." But higher honours were in store for him than 
 even Lidney had foretold. It so happened that about this 
 time the gentleman who usually did the rough work in 
 School Field broke his collar stud, or his collar bone, or 
 something ; and as Kinnoul weighed thirteen stone, and 
 was rather good in his ox-like way at treading out the 
 corns of his opponents, he was put into the Field Eleven 
 to play back-up-post in the bully and shove behind in the 
 rouge and do the savaging and the bruting and the heavy 
 business generally. He wore the quartered red and blue, 
 and then there was a vacancy in Pop, and in an evil hour 
 for themselves, for the School at large, and for my tutor's 
 in particular, they elected him and blackballed Lidney 
 (who was handicapped by the fact that he had some brains 
 while Kinnoul had none) ; a very bitter " pill " this for 
 the patron who had introduced him to the outer circles of 
 swelldom. From that day Kinnoul's plan of campaign 
 was changed ; the friendships that he sought before with 
 adroitest flattery he now demanded as a right ; and the 
 alliance which began with Kinnoul's toadying Lidney 
 ended in Lidney's playing jackal to Kinnoul. We began 
 to taste the horrors of living in the same house with a 
 newly swollen swell. At first we were lenient to his little 
 eccentricities ; when he appeared among us in stick-up 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 133 
 
 collars half an inch higher than the highest ever worn, 
 we only smiled a somewhat sickly smile, it is true ; 
 when he posed on my tutor's steps in striped trousers 
 that for looseness can rarely have been rivalled by the 
 Turkish Sultan in his palmiest days, we only laughed 
 somewhat bitterly perhaps ; but when he burst upon our 
 astonished eyes in a sky-blue woollen waistcoat that 
 frightened Emily, my tutor's children's tortoise, into fits 
 for a week, we shook our heads ; and when he began to 
 shout and storm about the passages and put on side in the 
 street as though he were Junior Keeper of Sixpenny at the 
 very least, we remarked that he must be beside himself 
 and treated him with that soothing tolerance which is 
 generally accorded to a dangerous maniac. 
 
 This policy might have answered , if he had been content 
 to be tolerated ; but the greater he grew the more 
 quarrelsome he became. When Bucklebury called him to 
 order for ostentatiously going to sleep in the Debating 
 Society, he left the room in the sulks. When Witstock 
 invited him to inscribe his speech in the Society's book 
 (Bucklebury and Witstock were respectively President 
 and Secretary), he refused on the ground that he had lost 
 sight of the shirt on whose cuff his notes had been 
 written. We heard that he was plotting and blaspheming 
 against the B. B. Club both day and night, and that 
 the body of the house barring the Shiny Fag and the 
 Shiny's adherents was with him to a boy. 
 
 One night in February the storm broke. 
 
134 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 II. A HOUSE DIVIDED. 
 
 " War ! Bloody war ! North, East, South, and West." 
 
 EVERYONE was in a tearing swearing bad temper, 
 that night, always excepting the College Clock which 
 under the exhilarating influence of a recent thaw 
 went so far as to strike seventeen. As a matter of fact, 
 probability and the hands of my watch pointed to eight, 
 as I escaped from the gas-laden atmosphere of pupil-room 
 and the philological mists of my tutor's " private 
 business," and wandered into Witstock's room in quest 
 of rational ideas and pure air. All the cold of February 
 was abroad in the passages, but the Vice's room glowed 
 like a furnace, redolent withal of singed trousers ; and no 
 wonder ; for he had drawn his chair up to the fire and 
 was scribbling furiously with his feet resting on the 
 mantelpiece and a notebook propped on his knee. I 
 knew by the savage way in which his pencil dashed and 
 dotted the paper that he was doing a mathematical extra 
 work, and was consequently prepared to shed innocent 
 blood by the bucketful. 
 
 " Good man ! " he murmured, ; " I want to kill some- 
 body. Who is it?" 
 
 My first act was to open the window. "You old 
 salamander," I gasped, " this is nearly as foul as pupil- 
 room." 
 
 "Ah," he answered, still jotting down figures, "thought 
 it was you. Nobody else would have the cheek. Fact 
 is, window was open. Then that blackguard Grice began 
 

 THE STORY OF DAGON. 135 
 
 to give tongue. Beast, he's in love ; sings all the twenty- 
 four hours. Couldn't stand him. Had to shut the 
 window. Curse this Algebra ! " 
 
 " No reason why you should sit and bake in a her- 
 metically sealed oven." I gave him the chance on 
 purpose, and he took it as innocently as a babe swallowing 
 the treacherous spoonful of powder sepultured in jam. 
 u Well," he replied, brightening, " I always rather fancied 
 a loaf's existence ! " Pundemonium had entered into 
 him, and his good temper was coming back. As luck 
 would have it, at this very moment the hoarse voice of 
 the butler down in the yard began to carol, 
 
 " I gave 'er one in the ivy bower, 
 " I gave 'er one in the eye " 
 
 The Vice rushed to the window, and thrust his head 
 out. " Grice, stop that death-rattle this instant." 
 
 The butler's pride was doubly wounded ; in the first 
 place he liked to be addressed as Mr. Grice in the 
 presence of his footmen ; in the second he did not like to 
 hear his singing described as a death-rattle : which it 
 distinctly suggested. He took no notice- of the Vice's 
 shout, except by inquiring in ostentatiously loud tones of 
 the second flunkey, " Enery, 'ow did the Dreadnought 
 come to swamp last Fourth o' June ? 'Oo was steering 
 of 'er ? " But Henry was a respecter of persons and 
 made no audible answer. The butler croaked on, 
 
 " And she shall 'old 'er George's 'and, 
 " And she shall 'old 'er jaw ! " 
 
 The Vice had turned purple. " Grice, you scoundrel, 
 stop that infernal noise. Do you hear me ? " he bellowed 
 in the deepest tones at his command. 
 
136 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 The butler's only answer was couched in a mocking 
 falsetto " 'Enery, you scoundrel, stop that infernal noise. 
 D'you 'ear me ! Oh lor' ! " and he continued to sing. 
 Witstock ground his teeth. " If he comes under the 
 window I'll bung a flower-pot at him." The butler's 
 bald head made a tempting mark in the moonlight. 
 " Now I can get him. Which end's which ? " 
 
 "It is the back towards us now ; I can see by the way 
 the light falls on it ; the forehead's more polished. But 
 it doesn't matter where you hit him." 
 
 " Yes, it does. I don't want to damage his nose. The 
 Empress is so fond of it says it's the best butler's nose 
 in Eton." 
 
 It was just like the Vice to consider his tutor's wife's 
 feelings at such a moment. By this time the butler had 
 reached the last and vilest verse, 
 
 " I would not say a damsel's heart, 
 " I would not " 
 
 " He might have left that one out," said Witstock ; 
 " the Empress's kids just going to bed, too. Grice, you 
 ringtail'd roarer, stop that row, or I'll come and break 
 you ! " 
 
 The butler snarled, " Ringtail'd roarer, is it ? That's 
 gratitood, that is. I'll see the governor about that," and 
 he lurched with unsteady step towards the back-door. 
 Down crashed the flower-pot, half a second too late. 
 
 u He'll wait till he's a bit steadier on his pins," I said ; 
 " then he'll go to my tutor, sure as nails." 
 
 " He can go to forty tutors for all I care," said the Vice 
 very grimly. " But I wish I'd got him with that flower- 
 pot. Now, as you are here, you may as well do some 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 137 
 
 sums for me. Only you mustn't do them right, or the 
 beak'll see there's been a confederate in the job." I opened 
 my eyes. "Yes," he added, " I know it's a dirty trick ; 
 but if I don't get some help I shall go mad. I'm dog- 
 tired." 
 
 I worked out a problem or two as accurately as seemed 
 compatible with his absolute ignorance of the subject, and 
 then strolled on to see Buck. A gust of cold wind met 
 me at the door ; both windows were open, and the President 
 himself was writing in his shirtsleeves amid a mass of 
 papers that rose and fell before the draught like the 
 canvas waves of an Adelphi melodrama. His hair was 
 damp and out of curl ; like Witstock he was in that state 
 of nervous irritation bordering on madness which comes 
 of uncongenial mental labour at a time when the physical 
 frame is dead-beat. The door shut with a bang as I 
 fielded a couple of sheets of broadrule that came sailing 
 towards me. Then I apologized and prepared to go. 
 " No. Stay," he said, u only don't talk. Some new 
 books on the table. See if they're fit for the fallow mind 
 of the Shiny Fag. I'm responsible to his mamma for 
 what he reads. Nothing stronger than Ouida for the 
 present." 
 
 " Can't I help you with that extra work ? " I asked. 
 He smiled a kingly smile over his shoulder. " No thanks. 
 I don't let my friends do dirty work of this sort for me," 
 and he darted at the Exercises in Elementary Algebra, 
 Selected and Arranged by Bluerot and Dodge, a glance 
 that would have shrivelled the leaves of a right-minded 
 book and made its sable characters blush scarlet from 
 title to tailpiece ; but this was only a cheap and ill printed 
 
138 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 mathematical publication. A few minutes later he groaned. 
 "I love the little man as my own soul," naming a 
 mathematical master, " though he has driven more keys 
 and steel pens than mathematics into my head ; but if he 
 wants me to spend six hours a week in working out mangy 
 sums that I've known the ins and outs of, these ten 
 years, why, he'd better take a turn between the shafts 
 himself. Stand aside," and he raised the book as if to hurl 
 it straight into the heart of the red-hot coals. 
 
 " Don't," I interposed. "You haven't shown up an 
 extra work for a fortnight. You told me so. If you 
 shirk again there'll be all sorts of ructions." 
 
 "You're right. You're always right, old chap. Wait 
 a bit. I'll talk to you presently." He bowed himself 
 again to the task ; for, like the great Raleigh, " he could 
 labour terribly." 
 
 A bar or two from Ruy Bias, whistled slightly out of 
 tune, preluded the approach of Lidney. He walked in, 
 (and of course left the door wide open) arrayed in an 
 elaborate and singularly hideous smoking-coat of his own 
 designing ; for he was one of those Miscellaneous Drones 
 who work out originality in all sorts of directions by rule 
 of thumb, and arrive at highly commonplace results. 
 Handsome he was, in a delicate girlish way ; like the 
 heroes of the Norse Sagas he had hair as long and yellow 
 as silk, and skin that was white and fine all over his body. 
 It was characteristic of Buck's self-control that in his 
 present bad temper he took the trouble to be civil to a 
 fellow for whom he had no great liking, and greeted him 
 with, " Hullo, Lidney ! Walk up. Oh, do you mind 
 shutting the door ? Thanks so much." Lidney flung 
 

 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 139 
 
 himself into the Presidential arm-chair, quite blind to 
 the fact that his host was manifestly busy. He talked for 
 some time, and Buck's answers grew shorter and shorter. 
 At last, " What I really came for," he remarked, " was to 
 ask you if you'd join me in hiring a piano for a month/' 
 
 " Never ! " said the President firmly. 
 
 Lidney looked hurt, and whistled for a minute or two 
 before he answered, " Well, anyway /shall get one." 
 
 " If you do," said Buck coolly, u I shall immediately 
 hamstring it. Hamstring you too, perhaps." 
 
 " No you won't," retorted the Captain of the House, 
 rather loftily. " But I've discovered the real bent of my 
 genius." He smacked his lips, as if saying to himself, 
 " Good expression real bent of my genius." 
 
 " Ahem ! Ah ! has anyone else discovered it ? " asked 
 Buck. 
 
 u Not yet ; they soon will, though. I've bought a 
 banjo." 
 
 For the first time Buck really forgot his extra work ; 
 he swung his chair round and stared Lidney full in the 
 face. " Look here, if you play on a banjo anywhere 
 within a mile of me, I'll burn it." 
 
 " Why, my dear sir, that's just what I got it for : to 
 serenade you." 
 
 " If you do, I'll throw you downstairs." 
 
 The Captain of the House shot at him what was 
 meant for a glance of freezing contempt, and stalked out 
 of the room. 
 
 " I've done it now," said the President, " I knew I 
 should quarrel with him sooner or later. Now he'll go 
 and blackguard my character to every fellow in the House." 
 
140 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 On my way down to supper I whittled out a moral. 
 There were the President and the Vice, good fellows both, 
 sweet-tempered fellows both, and here was this unholy 
 science of mathematics, which would never be of any 
 earthly use to either, souring and perverting their honest 
 natures. I had been barely ten minutes with Witstock, 
 and in that time he had come to flower-pots with the 
 butler ; I had only spent a quarter-of-an-hour in Buck's 
 room, and he had contrived to make a deadly enemy of 
 the Captain of the House. And in either case the cause 
 of strife was music music which, but for mathematics, 
 would have charms to soothe the savage breast. Now 
 music and mathematics cannot exist together ; and if one 
 must go, let it be mathematics. Q. E. D. 
 
 Results followed. On going soon after prayers to my 
 tutor's study to ask for my verses, I found Grice there 
 before me, relating his wrongs in a sorrowful voice ; I 
 caught the words, " Booty by the 'ouse gratooitous 
 hinsult ring-tail'd roarer." My tutor was a very perfect 
 gentleman, and always treated his servants with the 
 loftiest courtesy ; so in an absent-minded manner he tore 
 my verses into small fragments, and dropped them into 
 the wastepaper-basket, saying, " Would you kindly repeat 
 that expression again ? " 
 
 " RingtaiVd roarer was the words, sir." 
 
 My tutor frowned and tapped his forehead, obviously 
 startled by the enormity and grossness of Witstock'a 
 language. He took a clean sheet of paper from a drawer, 
 wrote the words down, and set them in a rack before 
 him, where they might readily catch his eye. " Do you 
 consider," he asked, "that the expression implies any 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 141 
 
 er reflection on the er soundness of your 
 lungs ? " 
 
 " Well, sir, I 'ave 'eard, though never takin' no interest in 
 such matters myself," (Oh, Grice, I know that you read 
 the Betting Intelligence daily in the Sportsman, and I 
 more than suspect you of having had dealings with a 
 " booky " in Windsor). "I 'ave 'card that on the Turf 
 a roarer is a 'orse as is a bit touched in the wind." 
 
 " I think so too, Grice. I will ascertain. You are 
 quite sure that you offered Mr. Witstock no provo- 
 cation ? " 
 
 ''Quite sure, sir. I was just crossin' the yard to get a 
 glass o' water, when he begun to 'oiler at me from 'is 
 window, foul names and all manner." 
 
 " Very well, Grice. That will do." 
 
 I have seldom seen my tutor -so angry. There is reason 
 to believe, from the large number of dictionaries and 
 lexicons of all languages which were found strewn about 
 his study next morning, that he spent a great part of the 
 night in trying to ascertain the precise meaning of 
 "ringtail'd roarer." He vowed he would complain of 
 Witstock, and actually wrote to the Head ; but Mrs. 
 Tutor burned the note. ^And the humour of it was 
 that "ringtail'd roarer" was the weakest milk-and-water 
 compared with what the Vice could do when put to it ; 
 here was a hardened sheep-stealer about to be hanged 
 for the merest ghost of a lamb ; it was as if Deacon Brodie's 
 real character had been revealed to his neighbours by the 
 theft of a tenpenny-nail. " When I do get the steam up," 
 he remarked pathetically, " I sometimes say things that 
 would knock a rhinoceros endways ; but to be District- 
 
1 42 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 Court-Martial'd for calling Grice a ringtail'd roarer it's 
 enough to make one put up the shutters and drink black- 
 currant tea. Why, I wouldn't mind saying ringtaiVd 
 roarer out loud at the Empress's Sabbath Tap ; do you 
 think they'ld sit up and snort ? Not they ! " 
 
 I mentioned that in the absence of mind occasioned by his 
 wrath my tutor tore up my verses. I was rather annoyed, 
 because I had taken more trouble over them than usual ; 
 yet perhaps it was better so ; those whom the gods love 
 die young. They were spared the agony of what Buck 
 used to call the " subcutaneous injection of violet ink. 1 ' 
 I had rather be tattooed all over like a savage baby than 
 stand by and see my tutor vivisect my verses, polishing 
 all the life out of them, and extracting the backbone in 
 small pieces. He generally thought it necessary to alter 
 every line ; " prose in convulsions " was his description 
 of my finest passages, but I always wanted to tell him 
 that his were like prose run mad. Heartless man ! when 
 I fished the pieces out of the basket and convinced him 
 much against his will that he had torn up my verses, he 
 said drily, " I have no doubt they were bad enough to 
 deserve it ! " And told me to do them again ; whereupon 
 I did " sweat extremely, and something spoke in choler, 
 ill and hasty " ; and my tutor was added to the number 
 of the B. B. Club's enemies ; and we had need of staunch 
 friends before that night was over. Strange things 
 happened. 
 
 Half-way down the stairs that led to Bucklebury's room 
 was a spacious landing, where as Witstock said and 
 Witstock's jokes were not always patterns of what a good 
 jest should be the young lions of the house used to hold 
 
mass-n 
 j 
 
 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 143 
 
 mass-meetings and roar after their pray. When they 
 roared too loudly Buck would sally forth like a dens ex 
 machind and disseminate law and order with a knotted 
 cane. Now the plan of switching your subordinates all 
 round with majestic impartiality when they make a noise 
 .If&n excellent one for preserving the Queen's peace, but 
 does not conduce to popularity, especially when the 
 Captain of the House is slack, and some Bucklebury with 
 a sense of duty usurps his office. On the night in 
 question Buck had made two pastoral visitations, and 
 the group on the landing was railing at him roundly. 
 Suddenly from the passage above came the sound of a 
 banjo strummed by unskilful fingers. u Ah ! " said 
 Kinnoul, chuckling, " there's Lidney serenading old 
 Buck. Listen." Bucklebury's voice was heard, once in 
 mild expostulation, then in sorrowful warning, lastly 
 uplifted in threatening anger, and thrice the player of the 
 banjo made answer with a laugh. Then there was a 
 rushing sound, a muffled cry, and Lidney came hurtling 
 towards them just clear of the stairs by a foot ; his 
 manner was agitated, his blazer was torn, and he himself 
 was more or less upside down ; he hit the group with 
 amazing force, scattering it in all directions, rebounded 
 from wall to banister, and collapsed in a dishevelled heap 
 upon the floor ; also flying through the air, but following 
 at a respectful distance, came the banjo. The great 
 Kinnoul condescended to pick him up and straighten him 
 out, while the rest showed their sympathy by enticing 
 the dust out of his trousers. Though not much hurt 
 he was blind dumb-mad with rage, as weak-minded 
 people can be. On the rare occasions when Bucklebury 
 
i 4 4 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 was angry he kept his sang-froid he might hay a room 
 or hamstring a piano or throw a Captain of the House 
 downstairs (no doubt this was a strong measure, and he 
 apologised for it afterwards in a letter that Lidney must 
 have destroyed unread) ; but he was quite prepared the 
 next moment to take off his hat to a lady and ask if she 
 had been playing tennis much lately and how she liked the 
 anthem in Chapel. When Lidney found his voice he 
 began to abuse the B. B. Club individually and in a lump. 
 Nor did he lack allies. Kinnoul of course hated us all 
 like sin and egged him on. Then there was Pooch, 
 Pooch the eternally half-gorged, Pooch the Apostle of 
 Radicalism and Revolution, Pooch whose hand was still 
 against every man's and in particular against the Mem- 
 ber's, because the Member had a habit of saying "swine ! " 
 laconically and kicking him instead of sympathising when 
 Pooch overate himself ; which still happened about once 
 a month. And there was Nature's Chemist, who 
 grumbled because Bucklebury, who lived next him, find- 
 ing himself half suffocated one night by noxious fumes 
 and poisonous gases, had rushed in and violently thrown 
 open his door and window, thus ruining a most important 
 experiment which for some inscrutable reason could never 
 be repeated and robbing humanity of priceless scientific 
 discoveries. And there was an obscure and boorish 
 person who had come to my tutor's from another house, 
 whence he was expelled for holding his former tutor's 
 head for five minutes under a cold water tap, apparently 
 because that learned scholar had declined to give him 
 dentist-leave during a Tuesday verse-school ; but after a 
 few months of stern discipline at my tutor's he cringed 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 145 
 
 before his own fag and sank into well-merited obscurity. 
 And there was a sombre skeleton who was always attend- 
 ing funerals and hated us all because we were so cheerful : 
 and Kinnoul's jackal the weak-kneed photographer, and 
 Kinnoul's deputy-jackal, a dark sleek snake-like Italian, 
 who always wore a flower in his button-hole and 
 a butterfly tie, and wanted to go into stick-ups on his 
 house-colours, but was afraid, knowing that Witstock, 
 who was a self-constituted censor of such pretensions, 
 would immediately tear them off and gibbet them on the 
 house notice-board. They were the very scum and 
 rakings of the forty fellows at my tutor's, but they mus- 
 tered a good deal of influence between them, and Kinnoul 
 was a cunning, slandering, intriguing fox. He went to the 
 sucking wetbobs and declared that Buck could have got 
 them places in the Boats for the First of March if he 
 had liked, but, of course, he cared nothing for the honour 
 and glory of the house ; and he went to the rising foot- 
 ball players and scattered broadcast promises and threats 
 of giving or withholding colours when he came to be 
 Keeper ; and he sought out the raw Volunteers who were 
 still stiff from the last field day, and declared that Witstock 
 had bullied them into joining, (and certainly the Vice was 
 a press-gang in miniature) ; and half-a-dozen round- 
 shouldered recruits groaned in unison, and began to 
 think that the Corps was a very bad bargain. 
 
 Nor did he stop here ; in violation of all rule and pre- 
 cedent, he and Lidney convened an Indignation Meeting 
 of the House Debating Society, and they passed a vote of 
 censure on Buck, who was President, and expelled the 
 four of us, and proceeded to elect new officers by secret 
 
 K 
 
146 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 voting. And now a strange thing happened ; the obvious 
 plan was to make Lidney President ; there were twelve 
 members originally, and now there were eight ; three of 
 these voted for Lidney, and one commonly supposed to 
 have been Pooch himself voted for Pooch ; KinnouFs 
 two jackals voted for Kinnoul ; and Lidney, who was the 
 soul of honour, and would never have dreamed of voting 
 for himself, voted for Kinnoul, and Kinnoul voted for 
 Kinnoul ; and so this mass of Scottish brawn, who could 
 no more make a speech than he could make a hymn, be- 
 came President of the mutilated remnants of my tutor's 
 Debating Society and ruled supreme. He made Lidney 
 write a letter to Bucklebury saying he would thank him 
 to mind his own business and leave him to manage the 
 house ; and a week later, having reached the height of 
 popularity by winning half-a-dozen events in School 
 Sports, he played his trump card, and by threatening 
 some and coaxing others he persuaded about twenty-five 
 fellows to agree to send the B. B. Club bodily to Coventry. 
 The whole house would have followed his bidding like 
 sheep, but for the Shiny Fag, who formed an Anti- 
 Kinnoul League in which he was largely aided by the 
 personal ferocity of his friend Turke, and the moral 
 support of my tutor's wife ; so the enemy's attempt to 
 organize a Strike amongst the Fags fell flat "flat as a 
 drunken Guardsman," said Peter Frank. As for my 
 tutor, at first he was rather pleased to find Lidney 
 attempting to reassert his authority ; but when he saw 
 that anarchy prevailed and might was right, and every 
 fellow did what seemed good in his own eyes, he began to 
 regret the old days when the passages cleared like magic 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 147 
 
 at the whistle of Bucklebury's cane, and the voice of the 
 Vice was still a power in the land, and even the good 
 sleepy old Member used his physical strength freely in the 
 cause of justice and of peace. For it became plainer day 
 by day that in these three was concentrated all the 
 collective grit and backbone of the house. They were not 
 ideally good boys, nor even what is called " earnest" ; they 
 did not hold prayer meetings, and their table-talk might 
 not always have been fit for the columns of the Lady^s 
 Pictorial ; but on the other hand they were not self- 
 conscious devotional enthusiasts, they had a high standard 
 of honour and of duty, they spoke the truth and feared 
 no man ; what is more, they knew their faults, every one 
 of them had reformed in some way or other since he came 
 to take command in the house, and the sense of leader- 
 ship and of responsibility had stamped them with the 
 characteristic Eton virtues of manly self-reliance, deter- 
 mination, and tact. Yet now the voice of the house so 
 at least they interpreted it had rejected them, and in the 
 bitterness of their hearts they stood aloof and watched 
 while Lidney and Kinnoul made clumsy efforts to steady 
 the swinging helm. 
 
 And all this while the Shiny Fag with his contingent 
 of Lower-boys was fighting a gallant uphill fight against 
 oppression, and the powers that used to be took arms and 
 ranged themselves on either side. Miss Endor had always 
 doubted Buck's character as a gentleman since one day 
 long ago when he was unable to take off his hat on 
 meeting her up town by reason of a pound of biscuits 
 which he was carrying concealed therein ; nor had she 
 yet forgiven his remark about the best Scotch marmalade 
 
 K 2 
 
148 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 flowing in Kinnoul's veins; so she flung her weight, 
 which was not a mere feather, into the scale of Alexander 
 the Lady-Killer, and in her train went Grice with ringtaiVd 
 roarer rankling in his breast, and 'Enery the second 
 flunkey, and a whole host of time-serving menials, and 
 the scale of the B. B. Club was about to kick the beam 
 when into it stepped the cook, ever mindful of the dark- 
 tressed damsel, her rival ; now the cook's weight was 
 colossal, and once again the balance was equal. The 
 Leghorn still wavered between her affection for Kinnoul 
 and her hatred of Miss Endor ; and Peter Frank lay low. 
 But there could be little doubt about the partisanship of 
 Mrs. Tutor, and no doubt whatever in the case of her 
 children, who had been staunch adherents of the Club 
 ever since they came to tea with us last summer. (What 
 lots of jam and strawberries they ate ! The Vice, who 
 doesn't understand children, was quite alarmed but that 
 is a different story). As for my tutor he went about 
 wringing his hands, and trying to forget that he had no 
 official cognizance of the schism, and interceding in vain : 
 for when he made overtures towards an amnesty Kinnoul 
 only stared blankly, and Lidney turned white or red and 
 talked glibly of insubordination : while Bucklebury closed 
 his teeth with a sudden click and changed the subject. 
 He always relapsed into Latin in moments of great 
 emotion, and now he wandered about complaining, 
 " The house is going ad canes to the dogs, positively ad 
 canes : becoming quite a bear-garden, hortus ursorum, 
 a regular hortus ursorum" And day by day his whiskers 
 grew more grey and his brow more troubled. 
 But Peter Frank lay low. 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 149 
 
 III. A SHATTERED IDOL. 
 
 " For sooner shall the Ethiop change his skin 
 Or from the Leopard shall her spots depart 
 Than this man change his old flagitious heart." 
 
 SOUTHEY. 
 
 " PETER ! " roared Kinnoul in strident tones. He had 
 come in from a run with the beagles, and was sitting on 
 the stairs taking off his boots. Now Peter Frank, though 
 Peter by baptism and lawful register, was Frank by grace 
 of my tutor's wife and dispensation of the butler, and it 
 had been impressed upon him that Peter was a vulgar 
 name, of Jewish origin and more than doubtful antecedents, 
 while Frank was highly respectable and even verged on 
 the aristocratic. He was like the lost dogs. u Name on 
 collar Semolina, but answers only to Tiny"' 1 Moreover he 
 was becoming jealous of the winks which Kinnoul bestowed 
 so freely on the pretty boys' maid, and was busy with the 
 spoons, and on the whole preferred not to answer to plain 
 " Peter." Kinnoul changed the wording of his summons ; 
 " Peter Frank ! " and this time Peter Frank's jolly face 
 popped out of the pantry-door. " Yes sir ! " he said. 
 
 " Peter Frank, you ugly beast, take these boots and clean 
 them ! " He hurled first one and then the other at the 
 flunkey below. Peter Frank's hands were as hard as 
 nails. He stopped the whizzing missiles with his clenched 
 fists and spoke winged words. 
 
 a Ugly beast, is it ? That's an apple too many in the 
 dozen, that is. You call me ugly? Well, if them as 
 made the pancake you calls your face 'ad planted a big 
 
i5o THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 toe in the middle of it instead o' that champagne-cork 
 you calls your nose, you might a' been fit to show your 
 'ead inside a drain. As it is, you airft!" and gathering 
 up the boots he retired swiftly into the pantry. "Ugly 
 beast, indeed ! " he muttered, " See if 'e ain't the ugly 
 beast 'imself one o' these days ! " 
 
 " Can you fight, sir ?" said Peter Frank in confidential 
 tones to the Member that same evening. The Member 
 said that he believed he could. 
 
 "Then why don't you knock that ugly feller's 'ead 
 off!" He pointed to where Kinnoul was swaggering 
 across the road. " / would if I 'ad the chance, but it 
 wouldn't be becomin' for one in my po-sition to mix 
 myself up with 'is face-improvers." 
 
 The Member went away and thought more deeply than 
 he had ever thought before. He was a very honest simple 
 fellow, this Ixworth ; indeed his worst fault was that he 
 rather liked to be thought wicked, and the worst wicked- 
 ness he ever confessed was that of driving four-in-hand 
 with a pretty cousin on the box. He hailed from the 
 Midlands, where he was heir of a long succession of Saxon 
 squires, and truly his ruddy face and big chest spoke most 
 comfortingly of broad acres. The four-in-hand was a 
 great joke against him : " he'ld like us to believe that he's 
 driven it smack through the Decalogue and back again," 
 said Witstock epexegetically one day to someone who 
 failed to understand the allusion. He was a charmingly 
 childlike and simple giant. His tutor once said to him, 
 " I think, Ixworth, you confine yourself too much to the 
 society of a narrow circle of friends. You ought to 
 cultivate the broader relations of school-life." Ixworth 
 
THE STORY OF DAGON. 151 
 
 thought for a moment and then answered quite innocently, 
 " Well, sir, I've got a very stout uncle coming to 
 see me next week ! " 
 
 Then again, his good humour and good nature were 
 unbounded, and though his friends chaffed him all 
 day and every day he never turned a hair ; but, as 
 Witstock once said, " It's all very well for us to rag the 
 Member, but really we're rather like the kids across the 
 way and the St. Bernard. He could turn and rend us 
 in a minute if he liked." We hardly realised how strong 
 he was ; but I remember seeing him single-shouldered 
 burst a door that half-a-dozen of us had charged without 
 producing the slightest effect. He might not be clever in 
 school work, but he was irpojSaToyj'wjjiwK ; and if there be 
 truth in Mr. Weller's maxim that " a man as can form a 
 ackerate opinion of a animal can form a ackerate opinion 
 of anything," our friend Txworth must have been a very 
 good judge of human nature. And now that Peter Frank 
 had put an idea in his head, the heavy wheels of his 
 honest mind began to turn, and he saw his way to over- 
 throwing the Tyranny of Alexander Kinnoul. The form 
 in which he put the case to me was this : " It's all very 
 well for this scorcher to turn Bucklebury and the Vice off 
 the box and take the reins and play old Harry with the 
 house, but why shouldn't I get him to fight me, and 
 smash him, and show these jugginses what a grovelling 
 crock he really is ? Rather good biz., I think." And I 
 agreed that it would be good business. 
 
 He spent the Easter holidays in taking lessons from a 
 North-country pugilist, from whom he won golden opinions 
 as "the buirdliest amatoor that ivvor a treaned " ; and 
 
152 THE STORY OF DAGON. 
 
 returned, not only deeper in the chest and bigger about 
 the biceps, but with a gleam of steadier purpose in his eye 
 and lines of new determination round his mouth. Even 
 his tutor noted with puzzled and gratified surprise one 
 result of the energy which this set resolve had imparted 
 to his formerly torpid intellect the fact that for the first 
 time on record he passed in Holiday Task. 
 
 It so happened that I was with him when his opportu- 
 nity came. The Vice was walking some friends through 
 School Yard at absence-time ; as they passed, Kinnoul, 
 who was standing near the gate, made a deliberately 
 offensive remark, " which I will not pollewt my pen with 
 describing " ; perhaps it was not intended to reach the 
 ladies' ears ; at any rate it did not ; but it was enough for 
 Ixworth, who waited till they were round the corner and 
 then struck Kinnoul across the face with his umbrella. 
 That hero was so aghast at the audacity of the outrage 
 that the Member had time to grip his arm and draw him 
 behind a pillar. " If you want to fight," he whispered, 
 "we'll have it out in the Playing Fields to-morrow 
 morning at 6." Kinnoul nodded (so far as the altitude of 
 his stick-ups would allow him), and they parted as though 
 the blow had been given in jest. 
 
 Ixworth came to me afterwards and asked me to be his 
 second. " Why not Buck or the Vice ? " I asked. 
 
 " Because they 'Id want to fight instead of me." I 
 suppose I winced at this, for he added, " You're not a 
 hot-tempered chappy like the Vice or a big strong beggar 
 like Buck." I admitted that I was not a habitual bruiser 
 and agreed to go with him ; and he made me promise 
 that no one besides us two should hear of it. I could see 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 153 
 
 that he was doubtful of the issue, and with reason ; for 
 Kinnoul had won the Boxing Prize at the School of 
 Arms. 
 
 One incident of that afternoon is very clearly pictured 
 in my memory. As we four were standing on the steps, 
 my tutor's youngest daughter happened to come past, 
 carrying some flowers carnations, I think from the 
 garden. She was a pretty child of eight or nine, and 
 perhaps as arrant a little flirt as ever strutted in short 
 petticoats : but a good little soul for all that. Years ago 
 when Ixworth was on the point of being sacked for smoking 
 in my tutor's study that was in his would-be bold bad 
 days she had been mainly instrumental in getting him 
 reprieved. So at least, said Mrs. Tutor ; but Mrs. Tutor 
 was fond of mothering her own good deeds on her children. 
 At any rate Constance had been and still was our most 
 loyal ally through the long struggle of the House Divided, 
 and she hated Kinnoul some of us know why. Now 
 she stopped and said solemnly, " I'm going to give each 
 of you a flower." 
 
 She began with Buck, who swept off his hat with quite 
 a grand air, kissed the small hand, and vowed he would 
 wear her token next to his heart. Then she handed one 
 to the Vice, and he blushed up to the eyes for the first and 
 only time in his life. " Too good of you," he said lamely. 
 And I well, never mind what I did : but when she came 
 to the Member he swung her off the ground and held her 
 up at arm's length. " May I ? " he said. 
 
 " Have you been smoking? " she inquired with artful 
 allusion. 
 
 " Not I." 
 
154 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 " Then you can have one. Oh ! No more ! " 
 
 He took three or four and let her go ; and afterwards I 
 saw him carefully putting the flower in water. 
 
 It was a little before six o'clock next morning when we 
 slipped through the pantry-window. Ixworth was wear- 
 ing Constance's carnation in his coat : " It ought to bring 
 me good luck," he remarked, laughing. " That's why I 
 kissed her. One should always have a lady's what d'you 
 call it ? " I suggested gage d ] amour, and he continued 
 to repeat the phrase at intervals with some satisfaction 
 until we reached Good Calx. I wondered how many 
 years had passed since the last fight in the old corner 
 under the white stone ; certainly none has been fought 
 since this. 
 
 Kinnoul was there before us, but alone, and when we 
 asked him where his second was, "Second ! " he said, 
 " What the blank should I want a blanked second for ? 
 You don't mean to fight it in rounds, do you ? " 
 
 " Good," said the Member shortly. " We'll hammer it 
 out straight ahead," and began to strip. There was 
 a characteristic contrast in the panoply of the two 
 champions. Ixworth had only to throw off his greatcoat, 
 and stood forth stripped to the waist : while Kinnoul had 
 come down elaborately and theatrically attired in all the 
 colours he could crowd on School field cap, House foot- 
 ball scarf, Twenty-two blazer, dark-blue shorts, Oppidan 
 Wall stockings, and yellow boots : hoping perhaps to 
 captivate the hearts of early housemaids. Quite sud- 
 denly a pair of black-trousered legs hove in sight over 
 the wall ; they were followed by the flaming waistcoat 
 and cheerful countenance of Peter Frank. " Good 
 
THE STORY OF DAGON. 155 
 
 mornin', sir," he said. "I found the pantry winder open,, 
 and thought I'ld take a bit of a walk. Grand mornin', 
 this, sir ; more particklerly for ugly beasts, like me," 
 turning to Kinnoul : who swore in an offhand manner, 
 and began to remove his shirt. One could not help 
 comparing the hard brown hide and knotty ridges of 
 muscle that clothed the Scotchman's huge spare frame 
 with the smooth skin pink and white except where it 
 was tanned by the sun and rolling beds of flesh that 
 covered his antagonist : and one compared them to the 
 disadvantage of the latter. Ixworth certainly seemed to 
 be in worse condition, and I whispered my fears to Peter 
 Frank u They say Kinnoul once killed a man in a fight 
 with poachers." 
 
 Peter Frank laughed aloud : " Knocked a little boy on 
 the 'ead with a thick stick, more likely ! Look 'ere, sir. 
 Mr. Ixworth's plump, but it ain't fat ; it's good beef and 
 beer ; but Ym," he jerked his thumb towards Kinnoul, 
 " 'e's only whisky and marmalade. See 'ow e's short in 
 the wind already with peelin 1 off 'is sweater ! Call Mr. 
 Pooch a belly-god ? Mr. Pooch don't swill the pison this 
 feller does. Now then, sir, are you ready ? Off! " 
 
 The fight had begun. Very warily they sparred for a 
 time, circling and advancing and retreating on the smooth 
 turf that lies without the football line, and marked each 
 the other's feints with hungry eye ; there was no sound 
 but their hard breathing, and a rattle of milk-carts on the 
 Slough road, and the applauding caws of rooks that sailed 
 across the blue and settled on the battlemented elms to see 
 the destinies of an Eton house determined on the plain 
 below. 
 
156 THE STORY OF DAGON. 
 
 Peter Frank stood back to guard against interruption 
 from the Cloisters, whose bedroom windows command 
 the battle-field, and I leaned against the wall, sick at 
 heart ; for I could not understand the Member's policy. 
 Now and again indeed he planted stingers on his adver- 
 sary's nose or eye or jaw, and once " Tapped his claret ! " 
 cried Peter Frank in an estacy. But in the main he 
 seemed intent only on guarding his face and was getting 
 severely punished about the body. Twice did Kinnoul 
 land what Peter Frank described as " solid pile-drivers on 
 the wind-bag," and knock him clean off his feet, and twice 
 the Member rose as game as ever. A third time the 
 Scotchman sent him to grass with a mighty right-hander 
 in the chest, and this time he lay for a second or two. 
 
 "Had enough ?" asked Kinnoul, his breath coming fast 
 and thick. The Member sprang to his feet, smiled, 
 opened his chest, formed for attack. Still parrying blows 
 that threatened his face, he began to drive his man about 
 the ground, just when he thought himself secure of 
 victory, and at last found occasion to place a terrific 
 stroke between the eyes that completely altered the 
 complexion of affairs as well as of Kinnoul. When he 
 rose his gait was heavy and his fighting clumsy and slow. 
 Peter Frank began to caper about, keeping up a running 
 commentary on the progress of the contest : " Got home 
 on the optic ! and a good 'un on the conk ! Now's 'is 
 chance ; he's took it ! Wot a beauty on the rag-box ! 
 Look out, sir. Ah, grandly stopped. That's a stinger, 
 strike me blue if it ain't. Spilin' 'is figurehead, that's Mr. 
 Ixworth's little game." 
 
 They had fought for eight minutes without a pause, 
 
THE STORY OF DAG ON. 157 
 
 except when one or other was knocked down. The 
 Member still kept his head ; Kinnoul was flailing away at 
 random ; both were blowing like grampuses. 
 
 At this very moment there came with steadfast step 
 across the grass a hoary-headed man whose ruddy face 
 bore witness to the ardent spirit that lurked within 
 rum, to judge by the smell ; he was attended by a 
 wheelbarrow, apparently more for companionship's sake 
 than with a view to anything like actual work. He 
 planted his bulky form so as to intercept my view of the 
 combatants, shot out his lower lip, and addressed me. He 
 said that it was a fine day, and the Playing Fields was 
 looking well, and who did I think would win at Lord's, 
 and he had served in the Crimea, and it was a grand day, 
 but dry for them as had to work, and he had half-a-crown 
 here that he would be willing to put on Eton at five to 
 two, and did I ever hear of old John Tanner as lived at 
 Chalvey, and how he started to build a cottage on a bit 
 o' common land, without by your leave or with your 
 leave, and the College they 
 
 I took the old gentleman firmly by either shoulder and 
 thrust him deep down into his wheelbarrow. As I did so 
 there was a thud, and I saw Kinnoul lying senseless on the 
 ground. Up came Peter Frank : u What price ugly 
 beasts this morning ? " he muttered, looking at the 
 Scotchman's face. We got some water and presently he 
 came to himself. Then I turned to the Member, who was 
 sitting helpless and stupid a few yards off. " My head 
 began to go," he said dreamily, " and the air was all 
 blood, and his face and arms were like trees in a mist ; 
 then the sun caught that big red curl on the left of his 
 
158 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 forehead ; I saw it quite plain and let out from the 
 shoulder, and there was a smash at the end of my fist, and 
 everything gave with a rush. I suppose I've won ? " I 
 told him he had won most nobly, and helped him to put 
 on his coat. 
 
 Kinnoul sat up and swore ; then he staggered to his 
 feet, refusing the hand that Ixworth offered him. 
 
 " Don't be a fool, Sir," said Peter Frank, not unkindly. 
 " You'd best get up quick," and gripping his arm firmly 
 he walked him off. We followed. As we turned the 
 corner into Weston's Yard we met a young master com- 
 ing out for a run before early school, who viewed our 
 attire and in particular the defeated champion's damaged 
 face with undisguised suspicion ; he looked for guidance 
 to his dog. The dog knew me, wagged his tail, and 
 passed on ; and the Bachelor of Arts nodded, remarked 
 rather nervously that it was a fresh morning, and went 
 his way wondering. A little farther along we met the 
 President and the Vice sprinting as if their lives depended 
 on it, coatless and collarless and evidently newly sprung 
 from bed ; when they saw the Member safe and sound 
 they cheered with a mighty cheer that brought half the 
 little Collegers to their windows. " Why," said Buck, 
 " the Shiny Fag came and pulled us out of bed and swore 
 you were getting killed : " for that young imp had 
 watched the opening of the battle from the top of the 
 wall, and had cut home to raise Cain generally and bring 
 up reinforcements. A minute later we met him charging 
 down the road at the head of a flying squadron of Lower- 
 boys, and straggling behind came half my tutor's fellows 
 in every stage of undress ; like wildfire had spread the 
 
THE STORY OF DAGON. 159 
 
 news that Ixworth was lighting Kinnoul down in the 
 Playing-fields, and every soul in the house even Pooch 
 who is only a stomach had jumped up, disdaining the 
 claims of the matutinal tub, and come racing down in a 
 shirt and trousers and a pair of pumps to see the great 
 spectacle. And now, when they saw his bruised and 
 battered countenance, Kinnoul's former partisans fell 
 away to right and to left, some going with outstretched 
 hands of congratulation to meet the B. B. Club as it 
 came swinging arm-in-arm down the middle of the street, 
 and some daring only to raise feeble hurrahs and drop in 
 behind our increasing ranks. 
 
 Our return was a triumphal procession. As we drew 
 near to my tutor's a wide figure in a bowler hat came 
 shambling down the steps. It was Grice. "Welcome 
 'ome, sir. Always 'oped to see you do it. This is a 
 glorious day for the 'Ouse." 
 
 "Have you swallowed that ringtail* d roarer ? " asked 
 the Vice. 
 
 The greasy man made greasy answer that bygones 
 should be bygones, and raised his hat reverently in the 
 belief that he was quoting Holy Writ. But the Vice only 
 shook with laughter and jerked the Member's sleeve, 
 "As I'm a living cox," he gasped, "that's the Endor 
 making signals to you." In truth a certain window was 
 raised with all caution to a height of six inches, and from 
 behind the drawn blind a lily hand began to agitate an 
 embroidered hankerchief. Elsewhere Mrs. Leghorn was 
 leaning out and brandishing a duster with frantic enthu- 
 siasm ; and, better still, the casements of my tutor's 
 children's nursery windows were flung open and there was 
 
160 THE STORY OF DAG ON. 
 
 a flutter of white garments and a chorus of childish trebles. 
 " Oh ! " cried a small voice, " He's wearing my flower ! " 
 The Member laughed and blew a kiss towards the roof, 
 so vaguely that it was appropriated by two other fair 
 dames, and led to a battle-royal, in which the Leghorn 
 accused Miss Endor of using powder, and Miss Endor 
 retorted with some asperity that if she did it was because 
 she had spoiled her complexion in early youth with 
 porridge. 
 
 So the B. B. Club reigned once more. May it reign for 
 ever ! And Kinnoul went to bed in pyjamas and plasters 
 and peace, and reappeared a week afterwards in a humbler 
 frame of mind. But no man worshipped him thereafter. 
 
 This is the Story of Dagon. And the reader who 
 loves a moral may determine for himself whether more 
 harm is done at a great school by the Athlete who 
 contributes to the common stock nothing but his Muscle, 
 or the Student who contributes nothing but his Brains, 
 by the Bigoted Muscleman or the Unmitigated Sap. 
 Which things are a paradox ; for it is a merciful provision 
 of nature that, while neither is ornamental, each is at 
 least useful in his small way as an unmistakeable warning 
 against the vice which he illustrates. 
 
AT THE SHRINE OF THE SACRED MONKEY. 
 
 " What was he doing, the great god Pan, 
 down in the reeds by the river ? " 
 
 E. B. BROWNING. 
 
 U TT'S infernally warm," grumbled the Vice, from 
 
 JL underneath a straw hat at least six feet in 
 diameter. 
 
 " I don't wonder under that flapping tea-tray," 
 growled Buck. "If you will wear misshapen pagodas 
 you're bound to be hot. Don't you remember what 
 Peter Frank said the other day ? " 
 
 " The heat o' the hatmosphere entirely depends on the 
 quality o' your thermometer." 
 
 " Apply the aphorism to your own degenerate case." 
 The Vice made no audible reply. He was taking up the 
 greater part of the most comfortable seat on the rafts and 
 slowly pulling the petals off a red rose and flipping them 
 up at the monkey above him ; and she mistook them for 
 insects and loved them with a love passing the love of 
 nuts. 
 
 u I wish Ixworth would look sharp," Buck went on 
 angrily. a He said he'd be down by half-past three, and 
 now it's a quarter to four. Those drybobs never think of 
 hurrying unless there's a Brew in prospect. We shan't 
 get to Surly to-night." The Vice stopped rolling up his 
 rose leaves, and disappointed the monkey for fully five 
 minutes. 
 
 " Haven't you heard ? " he began ; " why of course the 
 Member can't come down to-day; the last time I saw him 
 
1 62 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 he was groaning in bed with a vast bandage all over his 
 face, and shouting to the Shiny Fag to get him something 
 to eat ; he didn't mind much, so long as it wasn't a box 
 of Sardines, or a jelly fish ; so luckily his appetite is not 
 impaired." 
 
 " But what's happened to him ?" asked Buck impatiently. 
 
 " Well, you know there is a standing feud between the 
 Shiny Fag and Turke, and lately Pooch has been sticking 
 up for Turke and helping him to stand up against the 
 Shiny Fag, who has all the resources of the B. B. Club, 
 and all the authority and example of its President at his 
 back." 
 
 Buck, who was playing with a scull and gazing across the 
 river at some belligerent brewers, smiled rather sadly. 
 The Vice went on : " So the Shiny One determined to be 
 even with Pooch, even though he might have eaten him- 
 self into Upper Division, and declared himself insulted 
 when Lidney didn't give him a mess-fag ; accordingly he 
 collected all the crockery of the adjoining passages and 
 piled it in one immense murderous heap above the door 
 of Pooch's room ; the unfortunate Member came unsus- 
 pectingly to borrow an Extra Work, and before he could 
 mumble a prayer he had secreted several basins and a soap 
 dish in the region of his waistcoat. 
 
 "Some of the china was not so confiding, and hit him in 
 the eye ; as the Member himself said, tossing on the bed 
 of sickness ; * There was a noise as of the rush of many 
 waiters ; and after that it rained earthenware for two 
 minutes and a half by Pooch's clock. I hadn't the heart 
 to reproach the Shiny One, because the china edifice in 
 its original condition must have been quite a work of art.' " 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 
 
 163 
 
 "Then we'll start without him," said Buck promptly ; 
 Witstock wafted a kiss to the Monkey, who was intent on 
 her own domestic affairs, and took no notice of him ; and 
 we proceeded to establish ourselves in a sliding-seat gig ; 
 Witstock bow, Buck stroke, and myself steering. 
 
 " I don't consider," said the Vice, as he just dipped his 
 oar in the water, " that those people whose idea of rowing 
 begins, continues, and ends in Sweat, do themselves or 
 the great theory of Wet-bobbing any credit ; they sit 
 down in a boat and see nothing but the heaving back of 
 the fellow in front of them for an hour or two ; they 
 leave their soul on the blade of their oar, and then they 
 get out and imagine that rowing is a delightful thing, 
 although a little heating. It is a positive insult to anyone 
 who is bent on enjoying himself to be told to ' keep his 
 eye in the boat ' and * mind the time ' ; he might just as 
 well be on the tread-mill, where he would get just as 
 much exercise, and hear very much less bad language. 
 
 " Real pleasure consists in getting into a whiff-gig in half 
 change and sculling gently up as far as Hester's Shed, and 
 going to sleep under the willows on the Clewer bank, with 
 a novel in the boat to amuse you if the flies are too com- 
 municative, and an unfinished Extra Work in your pocket 
 to give a last finishing touch to your benignly beatified 
 state of mind just before you vanish into the Land of 
 Dreams." 
 
 Buck smiled indulgently ; he knew what the Vice meant. 
 He was far too keen and prominent a wet-bob to consider 
 Witstock's reflections as anything but the rankest heresy, 
 but he was no Philistine of the Philistines, and in his 
 earlier days had been a promising dry-bob, but had 
 
 L 2 
 
1 64 AT. THE SHRINE OF 
 
 deserted the Playing Fields, because he declared the life 
 was too slack for a Christian. 
 
 a I believe, after all," went on the Vice in his gravest 
 way, " I believe the great army of Dry-bobs have the pull 
 over us : they may be a trifle slack, but we are certainly 
 too energetic. As a class, of course," as he noticed Buck's 
 aristocratic lip curling into a smile, " There are some 
 exceptions I will not remark, as you all thought I was 
 going to, that they prove the rule, because that is the 
 most detestable proverb that ever an addle-headed 
 Mathematician coined ; but they do tend to raise our 
 general standard. 
 
 " Compare our state with that of the average Dry-bob. 
 The Dry-bob has a nice little constitutional provided him 
 every morning that there are games which is not often 
 in order to get to Drake's to see whether his name is 
 on the list. Every half-holiday up till half-past ten he is 
 stimulated by the gentle uncertainty of his captain's 
 temper he knows not whether he shall broil in the 
 afternoon sun, while someone else bats, and someone else 
 bowls, and someone else scores in the shade, while he is 
 stewing in the long grass at long-leg, or whether his name 
 will be conspicuous by its absence on the ill-written scrap 
 of inferior House note which means so much to the striving 
 herd. This must provide some little excitement during 
 9.45 schools; and 9.45 schools as a rule are dull, except 
 when somebody has seduced his tutor's dog with a stale 
 bun. He remembers with tears that last week he caught 
 a catch and made double figures and pleased his captain 
 so much that he picked him up quite high next time ; 
 and he felt so overcome that he had to stay out. 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 165 
 
 " But his courage rises as he reflects that he met his 
 Captain in the street a short time after, and in answer to 
 some pleasantry addressed to him by that worthy whether 
 he had eaten too many strawberry messes, or whether he 
 associated him with fielding and heat, verbal and solar, he 
 doesn't know, anyhow he replied lightly and gently, 'I 
 think you're a fool ; ' and that gives him a rising hope that 
 in time grows into a certainty that to-morrow afternoon 
 he will be free to put on a change coat and a straw hat 
 and to lie under a tree with a novel. Yes, Dry-bobbing 
 is a glorious life. 
 
 " I disagree with you, Vice," said Buck waking from a 
 dream of rat-hunting on the Windsor shore in bygone 
 days, and growing very energetic. 
 
 " There's more fun and more profit to be got out of the 
 river anyday ; and I've tried both. There is more mis- 
 management in Upper Club than there is at the Brocas ; 
 and in that lies the whole gist of the matter. There's 
 more discontent among dry-bobs than wet-bobs, and I 
 think that is a pretty good test of what I said before. 
 I was never so amused in my life as the other day when I 
 was rushing up to Pop to post a letter : the street outside 
 Drake's was swimming with outraged cricketers, only 
 restrained by five square yards of plate glass and a five foot 
 iron railing from wrecking the shop and tearing down 
 the fixtures ; and all because of a dirty little notice 
 announcing that " There will be no games to-day." 
 Even I was not allowed to go by in safety ; a crowd of 
 red-faced and angry people seized me by the collar and 
 wanted to know why in thunder there were to be no 
 games ? Fine day, ground in grand order, nothing to 
 
1 66 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 do and then came a string of personalities that a Bargee 
 would not have heard unmoved. 
 
 "I tried to appear calm ; I assured them that were I in 
 their place only the Captain of the Eleven's blood should 
 constitute my frugal supper ; I said it was a howling 
 shame and a lot more to the same effect ; but when 
 they wanted to know whether I had any influence with 
 the authorities I almost smiled ; and I knew a smile 
 meant my blood. 
 
 "Another day I and Ixworth were walking knee-deep in 
 mud up town under umbrellas and saw a similar crowd 
 on the pavement pointing to the streaming skies and 
 calling on all the heathen divinities to blast the Captain 
 of the Eleven. We thought them harsh ; and looked 
 silently at the window. " There will be games to-day." 
 I thought the notice, considering the state of the pave- 
 ment, a little premature ; but Ixworth was perfectly mad, 
 and it was all I could do to prevent his going over to the 
 enemy and blaspheming on the public highway. He 
 turned as green as an unripe banana. 
 
 "You can laugh if you like, Vice, about the joyful 
 uncertanties of the loafer strolling to see whether his name 
 is up or not, but you know that it makes a vast deal of 
 difference to the ordinary hard-working dry-bob. I have 
 known what it is to miss my name from the list and sink 
 down into the ooze of Refuse, to get so brutalized and 
 degraded in those haunts of anarchy as to consider bowl- 
 ing slow long hops at a net to a Sixpenny companion 
 drowsy with countless gallons a reasonable afternoon's 
 employment : but after that I took to wet-bobbing. 
 
 " Take an ordinary wet-bob's life. 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 167 
 
 "If he wants to go out he can go out ; there is no 
 arbitrary and despotic, not to say insulting announcement 
 in Drake's window for him, showing that So-and-so has 
 been kind enough to pick him up and commands him to 
 appear in Lower Club from half-past twelve in the 
 morning till about half-past eight at night ; he is not at 
 the beck and call of ten lazy, gallon-drinking, unsystematic 
 cricketers, each one of whom would shirk if he could, 
 and^ lay the blame on the rest, but he can go on the river 
 when and where he pleases, in every variety of boat, with 
 every degree of energy or slackness ; alone if he has 
 indigestion, with any number of friends if he's going to 
 bathe and that is the ideal of a slack wet-bob's life ; but 
 if you want real energy and a real discipline, there is no 
 better place to look for it than at the Brocas. The system 
 of the Boats, the races, the Eight itself, the strictness of 
 the training which is necessary to ensure success in races 
 all these are a voluntary discipline which does a fellow 
 a world of good. 
 
 " The very atmosphere of the rafts is brisker than the 
 muddy ether of Jordan ; even the monkey would shudder 
 at the crimes against law and order which pass unreproved 
 and even unnoticed in Upper Sixpenny ; and authority 
 which is absolutely supreme on the water is, in its own 
 sphere, derided and gibed at by the window-haunting 
 throng ; that's why I believe the Captain of the Boats 
 always has been, and always will be, a bigger swell than 
 the Captain of the Eleven ; his own alumni worship him 
 in a way that would make a rowdy Sixpenny boy blush 
 with shame, and the dry-bobbing part of the school can't 
 help catching some of the hot breath of adoration that 
 
1 68 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 never blows from out their own lungs towards the Powers 
 that Be. 
 
 "And I think they lose something by being so indepen- 
 dent. It is a good many pities that their thirsts for Batting 
 and Beer should be in such inverted proportions." 
 
 " I'm sure you're too hard on the poor dry-bobs, Buck," 
 said Witstock, trying to massacre a swan with his oar, and 
 failing dismally : " they are a laughter-loving herd, and I 
 respect them for it." 
 
 " If they have any faults, they are all on the surface, and 
 if we have any as a clan, of course they are more than 
 skin-deep. I know it gives one a twinge under the fifth 
 waistcoat button to see little boys immediately after 
 dinner laden with bread and butter and all the insignia of 
 Sixth Form Bench ; it looks so bestially provident ; but 
 in reality it isn't a bit worse than seeing the horizon 
 darkened three times a week with countless hosts of 
 tin-canned youth bearing gallons to appease the appetites 
 of Aquatic elevens. 
 
 " And I'm quite certain there's nothing this side of 
 Mesopotamia to run in the same street with Changing 
 Room immorality ; the common (yes, very common) hair 
 brush and the bent^button-hook and the glass that gives 
 you a smile like the first cut of a leg of mutton are the 
 only honest things in the place ; and the glass is a liar, 
 only as you're generally blushing when you look at it, it 
 shifts the blame on to you ; so I have some respect for it. 
 
 " But I believe I am the only person in my room who has 
 any respect for anything. I have seen a fellow walk 
 round the place lifting up the lid of every locker in the 
 room and slamming it down again when he found there 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 169 
 
 were no clothes he wanted in it, just like the man who 
 goes about with a grease-pot and a hammer in railway 
 stations. 
 
 U I have seen my own stock of raiment melt away like 
 butter on a Hindoo's beard a zephyr one night, a pair of 
 shorts the next, with a pair six sizes too small substituted 
 with the serene insolence that marks a pis aller apology. 
 And the most aggravating part of it all is that the fellow 
 who would try to drown himself privily in Cuckoo Weir, 
 overcome by guilt and a big stone, if he found twopence 
 halfpenny in the left-hand Docket of the pair of shorts he 
 had stolen with joy and worn off and on for six weeks, 
 with unmingled satisfaction would tear the shirt off your 
 back if he wanted it, and think no shame. There is a 
 distorted, secondhand flavour of honesty about it all 
 which smells right goodly in the nostrils of little boys let 
 loose in alien orchards, but which I'm sure the poor old 
 blind-folded goddess must turn up her nose at. 
 
 u And the ineffable piety of your Captain is something 
 to dream of. He comes up to you at the begining of each 
 half and asks you for half-a-crown for soap and sponges 
 in the washing-room. If you are young and guileless you 
 pay it with a smile ; if you are foolish you pay it 
 reluctantly with an old jest about the excellence of 
 breakfasts at Rowland's and the large amount of buttered 
 bun that half-a-crown judiciously expended can procure: if 
 you are wise you will be sorry to find that you've left your 
 change at home ; the absence of all soap and the soapy 
 scarcity of two and a quarter sponges will cause you less 
 acute grief in the immediate future if your are benignly 
 conscious that after all the conjunction of soap and sponges 
 
170 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 is a very economical arrangement, and no doubt spares 
 the other people's pockets. Wet-bobbing breeds energy 
 and all forms of lying, and Dry-bobbing slackness and a 
 bread-and-butter-and-tea morality that rises into some- 
 thing better in Upper Club and falls away into a beery 
 bitterness of mediocrity at Sixpenny nets and in Jordan. 
 I wish the Dry-bobs took as much interest in cricket as 
 we do in rowing." 
 
 " So they do, to start with," said Buck ; " but the 
 sickening indifference with which their best efforts are 
 met, and a system where merit is difficult of detection 
 and favouritism grows green unheeded, both combine to 
 take the starch out of them ; unless, of course, they happen 
 originally to have worn a pair of pretty trousers and 
 pleased the infant eye of the Keeper of Sixpenny ; in 
 which case life henceforth is is but cakes and ale." 
 
 We had got to Upper Hope by this time ; the brow of 
 the old river was heavy with oily sleep, and even the 
 young swans thought it too hot to flirt about in midstream. 
 There were a lot of fellows bathing at Athens, some of 
 them swimming about near the Windsor shore with the 
 cheerful disregard for their lives at the hands and oars of 
 careless rowers that characterises people in the water : the 
 ostrich imagines that by poking his beak into a sand hill 
 he thereby render his gigantic form invisible to the glare 
 of the panther's eye ; the average bather is almost more 
 astute, and has no difficulty in persuading himself that 
 because he can see a boatload of inebriated Guardsmen 
 they will easily and readily discern a blackish speck doing 
 duty for a head bobbing on the waves ; but he often gives 
 them credit for too much penetration ; and the nose of 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 
 
 171 
 
 their boat far too little. The parallel is not altogether 
 exact and logical, of course ; the soldiers are generally 
 drunk ; the bather is only half full of water ; and 
 so the latter is very often considerably handicapped, and 
 never finds it out till he sees stars and hears a strange 
 language. 
 
 " The Bather is one of the degenerate offshoots of the 
 system of pjama- towels and sock-cads," said Witstock. 
 
 " I nearly had a fit the other night. I went to get a 
 bath after the gas in the passage had been put out ; the 
 Endor was softly carolling her aged frame to sleep below, 
 and I think my tutor had eaten some unripe cherries at 
 dinner and was repenting him of the evil : anyhow, the 
 house seemed quiet enough. 
 
 " I had turned the corner, and was hunting behind the 
 pile of reeking dish-cloths which Leghorn loves to drape 
 the cans with for one of those necessary ingredients of a 
 bath, when something as white as a white tie dashed 
 silently past me and vanished in the glooms below. It 
 was a figure with a hood over its head and a flowing robe 
 behind ; the lower members appeared, as far as I could 
 judge, to be more or less partially draped ; and the whole 
 effect was weird and gruesome. I thought of all the tales 
 I knew about injured damsels, brutal lords, wise heads 
 wagged, secret chambers and all the rest of it ; in fact I'm 
 certain an unusually disjointed, not to say acrimonious 
 dispute with a Bombardon at a Band-practice that 
 aiternoon had entirely upset my nervous system. 
 
 " You remember the true tale about the timid lower-boy 
 who took secret counsel with his friends in pupil-room, 
 and confided to them that he saw visions by day and 
 
172 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 dreamt dreams by night, and was going down to the pit 
 for want of a recipe to scare away his ghostly enemy ? 
 
 " That boy was earnestly and prudently recommended 
 to smear his door with jam arranged in certain mystic 
 lines not hastily or carelessly, but decently and in order, 
 and with no reference to the price of jam or the feelings 
 of the boys' maid. 
 
 " So the tale goes on to tell how this persecuted youth 
 went down to Barnes Brown's and laid out a nice little 
 sum in apricot jam : there was a consistency and tenacity 
 about the brand which warranted his choice ; and that 
 same evening the six large pound pots made a very pretty 
 figure on the slab ; and the cook and the scullery-maid 
 both thought the whole house was going into training 
 for the Eight, and left the mutton to entertain itself in 
 consequence ; in a way that was neither polite to the 
 mutton nor pleasing to those who prefer sodden flesh to 
 raw. 
 
 "We are told that the same night mystic rites were 
 performed on the top passage. The festival was celebrated 
 with a view to the initiation of the Ghost-stricken ; the 
 timbers of the door quivered and creaked in response to 
 the heart-searchings of an old clothes brush enveloped in 
 apricot jam ; the panels guarding the entrance to the 
 haunted room groaned in spirit and sweated apricot 
 stones ; but the end was not yet come. 
 
 " That was the last night of the mysteries ; and I 
 believe of the ghosts as well. 
 
 " Next morning the stricken boy's tutor began to feel 
 the house very empty, and thought he'd stroll around a 
 bit. When he got to the top passage he saw a crowd 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 173 
 
 collected round the haunted door, and he eventually 
 found the Matron, the Butler, the Boy who Chalks the 
 Boots, and an unknown quantity of Boys' maids adhering 
 moistly to the apricot jam, like flies caught napping on a 
 treacle dish. 
 
 a But that is another story." 
 
 " The fantastic towel I met in the passage is one of the 
 degenerate outcomings of the bathing system. 
 
 " People who bathe make a profession of it ; they think 
 not of long games or bills up to Cookham, but of the num- 
 ber of bathes they can crowd into a day ; their rooms are 
 filled not with bats and pads, but with towels and Land 
 and Water hats ; their diet consists of the sticky buns and 
 oleaginous cheese provided by the wandering sock-cad, 
 and their hair is usually standing in the position of the 
 quills upon the fretful porpentine. A horrid race." 
 
 We had got up to Locks by this time, and the usual 
 contingent of ugly and importunate men on the bank 
 implored us to let them pull our boat over. We assured 
 them that we preferred going through Locks, it was so 
 much easier and restful ; but that made no difference, they 
 pointed out that there were three barges and a tug coming 
 in (in which they spoke the thing that was not) and that 
 we should never get to Surly at all. 
 
 It is a bad plan ever to mix yourself up with that crew. 
 If you want to pull over a boat yourself, do it ; but don't 
 let one of the harpies get hold of your craft ; the first 
 contact of his fingers with the rowlocks is the signal ; and 
 then oars fly in all directions, your blazer is dropped into 
 the river, the bottom-boards are smashed, and if you 
 manage to catch hold of a friendly plant as you are hurled 
 
174 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 down the bank you may count yourself lucky ; also lucky 
 if these modest little favours are valued at less than a 
 shilling. 
 
 Witstock is always great in Locks. 
 
 He has a way of greeting pushing Lower-boys in 
 unmanageable fours that makes them curl up like homesick 
 caterpillars ; this time he piloted us through a crowd of 
 fellows who were swearing at their friends instead of 
 going ahead, like so many other people, and pulled us 
 by the chains right up to the top of Locks, almost swamp- 
 ing two very small boys in whiffs, who were green in the 
 anticipation of death, and clutching their sculls as if at 
 any rate in death they would not be divided ; but the 
 Vice reassured them by half filling one of the boats with 
 water and telling the other not to mind him. 
 
 The bit of river between Locks and Surly is one of the 
 prettiest the great yellow irises peer out of the rushes, 
 and the stream twists and bends under the hanging 
 sallows in a way that is only disconcerting to a professional 
 steerer, and Boveney Church, hedged in by its circle of 
 elms, as perfect as a row of spring peas, is the quaintest 
 of quaint little edifices. 
 
 My tutor has good stories about that circle of elms. 
 
 He tells us about twice a half at dinner that the reason 
 why those elms came to be planted is that in what he is 
 pleased to call the good old times, irreverent and facetious 
 bargees, passing down the river, spied a church on shore 
 decorated with a certain number of glass windows ; and, 
 since it was a tradition of their education that glass 
 windows were meant to be broken, like the lewd fellows ot 
 the baser sort that they were, they hastily seized chunks 
 
THE SACRED MONKEY. 175 
 
 of coal and had ten minutes very pretty target-practice 
 from the summit of their coal heaps. 
 
 Then my tutor affirms that the rustic population of the 
 surrounding hamlets took umbrage at the holiday inso- 
 lence of the bargees' conduct ; they couldn't remove the 
 glass, because then the church would have been a little 
 draughtier than it always had been ; they were afraid to 
 move the church; because in those days people knew 
 nothing about Mr. Humphrey and Tin Tabernacles. 
 
 So finally they decided on a course which on the face 
 of it is incompatible with the tenets of a rustic com- 
 munity their course was both far-sighted and unselfish ; 
 they sorrowfully came to the conclusion that five or six 
 generations must submit to the humiliating discipline of 
 sitting in church of a Sunday and listening to the crash 
 of painted glass and the wholesale destruction of more or 
 less impossible Peters and underdone Pauls, and watching 
 the aisle gradually taking upon itself the appearance and 
 behaviour of a coal-hole, with all its dirt and none of its 
 decent obscurity. 
 
 This must have been very self-denying of those rustics, 
 and especially of the sexton, who presumably had to 
 sweep up the coal and the Daniels in the Dens (who were 
 lying down like lambs with their shattered Lions in 
 obscure pews) and give extensive orders to the glazier early 
 on Monday morning ; and besides this, it must have been 
 so disheartening to the parson and pew-opener, who no 
 doubt did well according to their lights ; and must have 
 inclined them to say nasty thing about the bituminous 
 extravagance of the bargee, and still nastier things about 
 the Architect. 
 
176 AT THE SHRINE OF 
 
 But the system had its mitigating points : the annual 
 coal supply was found to be sufficient to support several 
 almswomen and a curate after all necessary expenses in 
 connection with the windows and damage done to cavilling 
 parishioners on their way to and from church ; and 
 so, as the beadle sagely remarked over a pot of tenpenny : 
 " the laughter of naughty men was turned to their 
 shame." And their farsighted plan was to build a hedge 
 of elms all round the church ; and it was very long- 
 suffering, because the elms couldn't possibly grow up to 
 what Thucydides calls TO dkayKcuoTaTOj' uvj/os under a 
 couple of hundred years ; and by that time all the Bargees 
 had died out ; although the good people were not aware 
 of the fact at the time. So the 'trees grew up, watered by 
 the pious tears of the charwoman and sunned in the 
 beams of the new incumbent's jolly face ; for he did away 
 with the almshouses and kept a couple of extra hunters 
 instead ; and he curtailed his sermons and blessed the 
 unrighteousness of the Heathen ; and his coalheap waxed 
 fat and well-liking. But alas, when the trees were big 
 enough to harbour birds' nests and throw a shade worth 
 looking at, the true Bargee was as extinct as the Dodo ; 
 and the Vicar got no more coal and found he could ouly 
 hunt twice a week. 
 
 This is my tutor's tale, and I have always thought it 
 a nice one, but I've never been quite able to believe it ; 
 because the church is a good two hundred yards from the 
 river ; and I've never yet met a bargee or anyone else 
 who could throw a lump of coal two hundred yards ; but 
 of course this doesn't materially impair the story. 
 
 We got to Surly at last ; and ran up to the house in 
 

 THE SACRED MONKEY. 177 
 
 the greediest possible fashion ; and inside we found three 
 different young women, whom the Vice accosted as 
 u Pussy " in turn ; I don't know whether it was their 
 genuine title or a term of promiscuous endearment specially 
 devised by Witstock anyhow, they procured us lemon- 
 squashes and Smyrna biscuits in the twinkling of an eye 
 when accosted familiarly by the name of " Pussy " ; and I 
 have stood for hours on ordinary days before the pewters 
 and the beer-handles looking at the melancholy privates 
 in the bar opposite drinking themselves into afternoon 
 condition and never so much as got a look from this 
 tripartite Puss. 
 
 But then the Vice is a wonderful boy. 
 
 We went out into the garden after that, and Buck and 
 Witstock first began by throwing cane-chairs at one 
 another, and then finished up 1 , by making a steeplechase 
 course with the tables and racing over it. Which things 
 the waiter condemned. And then they drank their 
 lemon-squashes with all the gusto engendered by a noisy 
 dispute with the proprietor as to who should pay for a 
 broken plate and two glasses, the former of which had 
 made a very average quoit while its constitution stood the 
 work ; and the latter had only been dropped by Buck in 
 the deep field after a great catching match, in which 
 Witstock was easily victorious. 
 
 After a bit we went to look for the gig ; and when we 
 found that someone had gone away with all the cushions 
 we sent forth winged words which penetrated even the 
 recesses of the painted hovel where three small lower-boys 
 sat smoking mediocre cigarettes with all the energy and 
 
 most of the indiscretion of extreme youth. And as we 
 
 M 
 
178 AT THE SHRINE OF &c. 
 
 rowed very gently homewards we agreed that rowing 
 might be good, and racing might be good, but that the 
 River was made for the Slack, and only the Slack could 
 know to the full' its beauties and delights. 
 
WHAT WE DO AND WHAT WE SAY. 
 
 " Do you mean that red-faced fellow walking up Charlie Wise's yard 
 as if Creation was his wash-pot[? " 
 
 " My good sir, don't talk so loud ! That's what we call an Athlete Pure 
 and Simple : You ought to know him." 
 
 " Not for all his Purity and Simplicity," said the Stranger. 
 
 PRESENT ETONIAN. 
 
 A. Colts must be broken and colts must feel 
 
 Snaffle and bearing-rein : 
 Suffer the sound of the grinding wheel, 
 Start at the sting of the careless heel, 
 
 Bow to a rider's brain : 
 Toil to the tune of the carter's lash, 
 
 Plodding before the wain : 
 Struggle where silken jackets flash 
 Over the brook and fences crash 
 
 And whip-cuts fall like rain ; 
 But to gallop free on the grassy lea 
 
 Can never be ours again. 
 
 B. Pleasure we take for pleasure's sake 
 
 That is the truest pain : 
 Think you the falcon, trained to stoop, 
 
 Yearns for his freedom again ? 
 Better to hear the huntsman's whoop, 
 Better to charge with the snorting troop, 
 
 Than browse on the grassy plain. 
 
 IN THE PADDOCK. 
 
 OCRATES, that poor old hen-pecked philosopher, 
 
 was said to possess a certain Satjjuuy, or Genius. 
 Now this 8cujjiwi> or Genius was apparently a most 
 inconvenient appendage to make a poor but Biblical 
 translation of the nasty word Scup^, it was the very Devil 
 of a Genius and used to lead the poor old man no end 
 
 M 2 
 
i8o WHAT WE DO AND 
 
 of a dance in the spare moments when Xanthippe wasn't 
 emptying slop-basins over his head. It seems to have 
 been in the habit of following him down the streets of 
 Athens and pulling his coat-tails when he thought of 
 doing anything naughty that is, of which Xanthippe 
 might have disapproved and not only this ; it used to 
 prevent him doing anything he wanted, from interviewing 
 a Cynic reporter to getting a shave, and all in the most 
 cantankerous spirit of smallmindedness. u / may walk 
 down to the Piraeus /" the sage would tremulously ask. 
 a Most certainly not" replied the Demon. 
 
 u At any rate I may take a bath ? " " No, most em- 
 phatically no" the Demon would reply. 
 
 And there can be no manner of doubt in the minds of 
 rational people that this mental habit of questioning, 
 added to the negative and sometimes abusive answers 
 of the Demon, begat in Socrates that dubious taste for 
 street-corner conversation which eventually made him 
 Crito's debtor for a Cock, and handed his name down 
 to the execration of a thousand generations of school-boys. 
 And all this for the sake of Question and Answer. Which 
 even Mr. Jowett will allow is one of the poorest forms of 
 conversation that ever was. 
 
 At Eton, Public Opinion takes something of the form 
 of Socrates' Demon ; it does not tell us what to do ; it 
 confines itself, in a narrow and unsatisfactory way, to 
 telling us only what we are not to do. 
 
 Perhaps this is true all the world over, but it is more 
 strongly felt at Eton because nowhere else do the shrines of 
 the Little Tin Gods, Etiquette and Good Form, receive 
 costlier votive offerings. 
 
WHAT WE SAY. 
 
 181 
 
 I remember when I was at a private school getting a 
 letter from a friend who had just come here, and who was 
 evidently sucking in the rankest out-breathings of Lower 
 Boyism at every pore : the eternal " Thou shalt not," 
 ran through every line. 
 
 " When you come here," he wrote, " there are no end 
 of things that you won't be able to do. You mustn't wear 
 rough cloth and shiny buttons ; you mustn't walk fast, you 
 mustn't walk slow, you mustn't stop to talk to a fellow in 
 the street ; you mustn't turn up your trousers, you musn't 
 wear loud checks, you mustn't sit on a gate, you must 
 only walk on one side of the street ; and above all, you 
 mustrft wear a good hat" That long prohibiting list 
 puzzled my infantile imagination not a little ; but then 
 I didn't know, as I know now, that the Little Tin Gods 
 are only tin, and not very formidable people after all. 
 
 This artless letter is a key to a phase of Eton life which 
 is only too prominent, and which, from the very con- 
 ditions of its existence, must have an influence more or 
 less important on every one who comes to the school : 
 small minds have coined the Shibboleth of its traditions, 
 small minds drink it in and make it part of themselves, 
 and small minds hand it on in undiminished vigour to 
 successive generations of new boys : I shall never forget 
 the kicking I received at the feet of an infuriated mob 
 one morning when Lower Chapel was disgorging its 
 victims up Keats' Lane, merely because my jacket was a 
 shade rougher, and my buttons a trifle smoother than 
 those recommended by the great voice of Scugdom. 
 
 It is not hard to see the effects which a soul-surrender- 
 ing pandering to the cries of littleness brings upon its 
 
i82 WHAT WE DO AND 
 
 victims. They are always the very flower of Fourth 
 Form, the heroes of Pupil-room, and the bane of their 
 House Captain's life, but as time goes on they grow less 
 and less important in other people's eyes, and in due 
 proportion more and more important in their own ; their 
 natural temper has prevented their taking much interest 
 in such absurd occupations as cricket and football ; work 
 is out of the question, and gradually they sink into the 
 ranks of the herd that constitutes the Ruck. It is with 
 such people in view, for whom Eton has done nothing 
 except to teach them that boors are not loved and that 
 white ties take a lot of tying, that maundering old gen- 
 tlemen, whose public school experiences were a very 
 similar accumulation of foppish nothingness, write pitiable 
 letters to the daily papers and bring the name of our 
 Mother into disrepute where the foolish most do con- 
 gregate. 
 
 It were worth while to try and set some of these good 
 people straight. A preacher in Chapel he was one who 
 knows the place better than any man living said a short 
 time ago that he had been a third party to a conversation 
 in which public schools were under discussion, and one 
 man asked the other how his son was getting on at Eton ; 
 whether he was popular. " I'm afraid not," said the 
 other, " he is a boy of some character" Then the 
 preacher went on to warn us against our besetting sin of 
 indifference, against our contempt for unconventional 
 people and forms of expression, against our nil admirari 
 standard. The preacher was right : we are too apt to 
 hide every feeling worth having under the veneer of an 
 assumed cynicism ; not many of us can pass through the 
 
WHAT WE SAY. 
 
 183 
 
 furnace of Lower Boy criticism without carrying away 
 the smell of fire on our clothes ; the iron enters into the 
 soul too deep to let us wrench it out, even if we would. 
 The story was misleading, and not to the point in its 
 chief object the proving that Eton cannot appreciate 
 originality and force of character but it contained one 
 touch which is worth more as an illustration of the 
 objects of our life here than many sermons. 
 
 The man who wanted to find out whether his friend's 
 son was fulfilling the objects for which he was sent to 
 school didn't ask whether he had won the Newcastle or 
 was in Sixth Form, or even whether he was in the Field 
 or the Eight : his question showed that he was an Etonian 
 and a man who had profited by being an Etonian : he 
 only asked : " Is he popular ? " 
 
 Matthew Arnold once said, in answer to a question as 
 to what was an Etonian's distinctive characteristic, that it 
 was eurpcureXia. If you look out eurpaireXia in a Liddell 
 and Scott, (which is really not such a bad book as you 
 might imagine) you will find that it is the happy mean 
 the aurea mediocritas between the jSwjjioXoxos and the 
 aypoiKos ; and you will no doubt be a good deal the 
 wiser. 
 
 But if you are not a Greek scholar you will not be 
 far wrong if you translate it by the word Versatility, and 
 bearing in mind that Arnold said it was the Etonian's 
 characteristic, it will not be very surprising if the greatest 
 success is obtained at Eton by those who possess the 
 quality in the highest degree. 
 
 Pop is the social haven where every one would be : no 
 privilege is more dearly and universally prized than that 
 
1 84 WHAT WE DO AND 
 
 which allows the favoured few to court destruction at the 
 heels of Charlie Wise's cab-horses and to inhale the 
 invigorating ammoniacal breeze which is wafted over the 
 green-clad seats and uncut papers of the pleasant, dingy 
 room at the top of the dark flight of stairs ; but to get to 
 these the new-comer has to be in some way distinguished, 
 and to be distinguished he must have some force of 
 character. 
 
 It is quite a mistake to suppose that only athletes achieve 
 popularity ; it is the social function of athletics to bring 
 certain people into prominence ; they have shown them- 
 selves to be plucky, determined, enduring and temperate, 
 and that is sufficient to make them well-known and 
 perhaps respected, but their period of probation only 
 begins with their prominence, and they must show 
 themselves to be more than mere athletes before the basis 
 of athletic skill can win them popularity. 
 
 And here our versatility steps in. 
 
 Whether an athletic standard is a right and proper one 
 by which to measure all sorts and conditions of men is 
 beside the question : it has come to be so in nearly all 
 great schools, and we have to deal with things as they 
 are, not as our grandmammas and great-uncles would 
 make them. It is when athletics have brought anyone 
 before the eyes of the whole school that he has to shew 
 his euTpcnreXia or subside into an honourable oblivion 
 the question is then, not how to make friends, but how 
 not to make enemies ; anyone can count his friends on 
 the fingers of his left hand ; it is his business to see that 
 his right hand does not shew a corresponding number of 
 enemies. 
 
WHAT WE SAY. 185 
 
 But then it is that the power of creating popularity, 
 which is in itself the manifestation of force of character, 
 is brought out : it is one thing to toady, quite another 
 thing to have the reputation of being a good fellow. 
 
 Very few of us can go through even our public school 
 life in the simple childlike spirit that one meets in Lydia 
 Marsh ; where one is "Hail-fellow-well-met " with every- 
 body and every nobody, and we have only to look at some 
 uncompromising ruffian to make him our devoted slave for 
 life : most of us find that the brambles are just as thick 
 as the roses, but that if we want to enjoy the roses it 
 were best not to scratch ourselves with their thorns. 
 
 And so we get a connected argument, working both 
 ways. Popularity is the test of success ; success is 
 popularity. 
 
 No one can hope to achieve popularity before he has 
 been in the school three years at the least, and those 
 three years must have been spent profitably and to some 
 purpose, or else any sudden cotip will fall flat. 
 
 The Shiny Fag used to say with a sneer, " Oh yes, you 
 only have to be known to get into Pop nowadays," but 
 he forgot what he meant by being known : the power 
 which has put a fellow into the Eleven or Eight has not 
 been dormant throughout the previous part of his life, 
 and ever since he was a scug in Fourth Form he has 
 shunned the Little Tin Gods and taken an intelligent 
 interest in everything and a tremendous interest in 
 something : like the well-educated man, he knows 
 something of everything, and everything of something. 
 
 No one that we have ever known though perhaps 
 such creatures do exist ; feeding on the garbage that flows 
 
i86 WHAT WE DO AND 
 
 from the grumbling, ungrammatical pen of the habitual 
 letter-writer has ever ventured to assert that the whole 
 end of an Eton boy's life is to amass Greek roots and 
 write passable elegiacs, and if this is so, it is fair to 
 conclude that he is intended to learn something from all 
 the different occupations which go to make up our life. 
 It is only the boy who mixes in different sets and hears 
 two sides of a question, who meets one lot of friends at 
 the Musical, and another lot with the Volunteers, who is 
 known on the river as well as with the beagles, who retains 
 his individuality by not allowing himself to become a 
 a member of a set which has set up some Golden Calf or 
 other of its own and calls on everyone else to fall down 
 and worship, but who, by widening his ideas in the process 
 of hearing what different people have to say on the same 
 subject, is enabled to form his own opinions it is only he 
 who can profit by all he sees and hears about him and 
 make friends with those opposite factions which shall 
 someday unite in doing him honour as a fellow of some 
 individuality. And now there are three steps : Versatility 
 means Popularity ; Popularity means Success ; Success 
 means Popularity. 
 
 Our kindly Lower Boy friend's letter was an average 
 type of the conditions under which the new boy's lot is 
 cast for at least his first year and a half. He is kicked if 
 he is dirty, and kicked if he is too smart, which is all 
 just and proper ; and in the process he learns to kick 
 other people, which is just and proper too. He comes 
 back in the holidays neater in his dress and less enthus- 
 iastic than of yore ; he pretends to know what it is to 
 feel bored ; and his sisters, with the candour that lends 
 
WHAT WE SAY. 187 
 
 such a zest to our family relations, all declare that he is 
 ' very much improved.' 
 
 Sometimes he is, and sometimes he isn't, even our 
 sisters are liable to err ; and it depends on his being either 
 an animal who would shirk his cold tub on the earliest 
 possible opportunity, or one endowed with a more than 
 ordinary share of that force of character which we are 
 said to disregard : in the former case he is much improved, 
 in the latter case it is an open question whether he is or 
 not. 
 
 It is true that we bring everyone up to a certain standard, 
 to the level of shaven respectability ; we can show no 
 long-haired poets, we boast no cultivated prigs ; and even 
 if we lose something of originality in the process we gain 
 far more in the healthy manly tone that is recognised as 
 the Rubicon over which all those who wish to come to 
 honour must pass. We have long since ceased to hold 
 midnight orgies over suspicious-looking baskets stuffed 
 with jam-tarts ; no longer do we roast harmless little boys 
 over the nocturnal oven, but the newly elected member of 
 Pop still goes down to JefFeries' and orders up a huge 
 bundle of canes, the only outward and visible sign that 
 Eton retains the primitive theory that the strong are the 
 good and the mighty the virtuous. 
 
 But those who rise to the greatest success are not the 
 athletes at all, in the usual acceptation of the word ; they 
 may take an interest in games as a means to an end, but 
 they are their pleasure and not their business, and they 
 succeed because of that very force of character which we 
 are wrongly supposed to disregard. 
 
 They may not wear ducks in hot weather, their epithets 
 
i88 WHAT WE DO AND 
 
 may not be aquatic nor their slang redolent of Middle 
 Club, but they have succeeded in some one thing, and 
 they have in every case fulfilled the chief object of an Eton 
 life and verified Matthew Arnold words by getting a 
 knowledge of all that goes on around them ; not excluding 
 athletics like the sap, nor the Muses like the athlete ; 
 when they have made themselves teretes alque rotundi 
 they shrink not from the clash of shins in the bully, and 
 can sit, unmoved to tears, in front of the professional 
 wetbobs at the Musical. 
 
 But in reality, although it is not generally known, the 
 exclusive athlete is not the boy who as a rule gains much 
 social distinction, nor is he luckily a very common type ; 
 those who are favoured on the field or on the river usually 
 possess some of the characteristics which we have described 
 as helping to form the standard by which success and 
 failure alike are to be tested. But some others do not ; 
 as a race they are by no means extinct, for sometimes 
 they come to great honour, and then they are apt to be 
 puffed up with pride and to try to judge other people's 
 actions and to criticise them in the light of their own 
 intellectual attainments ; (which are not profound), because 
 very often, unlike their exteriors, their minds are not fat 
 and well-liking ; too often are they allowed to lack and 
 suffer hunger, and it is unreasonable to expect a servant, 
 however humble, who is satisfied, nay, gorged with an 
 intellectual Bare Bohn's feast, to look at life with anything 
 but a jaundiced eye, or to regard other people's actions 
 with anything but a contemptuous disapproval : the 
 hunger of the body is far from being transmitted to the 
 soul, and perhaps it is in this fact that we find the secret of 
 
WHAT WE SAY. 189 
 
 their occasional successes ; for people love a well-satisfied 
 face, and think it is the result of the drapa|ia or ' mental 
 repose ' which Epicurus held to spring only from a good 
 conscience, but which his later disciples have unanimously 
 and by acclamation decided is only obtainable in sleep. 
 
 Verily the children of darkness are in their generation 
 wiser than the children of light. 
 
 But, after all, when the Childlike Athlete has forgotten 
 that he is not siding, and that there are plenty of Lower 
 Boys looking on ; when he has forgotten that he scraped 
 into Pop at the end of last half because he could catch 
 a football on the end of his toe and send it flying back 
 through the air for quite a long distance with a touchingly 
 pretty air of importance, and that the Boy who Chalks 
 the Boots undoubtedly looks upon him as a great swell 
 when he has forgotten all these things (which are no doubt 
 very hard to forget all at once, being so numerous and so 
 important ; dinner and tea are on the whole the best 
 times for such forgetfulness, because then the mind is 
 occupied with even weightier matters), he is a most 
 estimable fellow, and worthy a tailor's reverence and a 
 bootmaker's adoration. 
 
 But he oughtn't to think that 
 
 We will even go further, and be still more lenient. He 
 oughtn't to think at all ; because the process we are 
 assured is eminently painful and in some cases attended 
 with baneful results to the digestion. 
 
EPILOGU E. 
 
 " But now the whole Round Table is dissolved." 
 Was that a death-knell ringing in our ears ? No, it 
 was only a bumble-bee endeavouring to break in at our 
 window. If he succeeds, we shall brain him with a tea- 
 spoon. And, by the cheek of the living Helen, here 
 comes a wasp sailing serenely between the curtains. We 
 know that wasp well. He has long cherished fell designs 
 upon our marmalade, and but for the glass cover (in whose 
 transparency he still finds a baffling and irritating mystery) 
 would long ago have committed most serious depredations. 
 As it is, he has more than once ravaged the entire sock- 
 cupboard during our absence at morning chapel. Now 
 he expiates his crimes by death, and is accorded honourable 
 sepulture in our window-box. " In large quantities," 
 says Witstock, "the wasp is an admirable fertilizer." 
 
 It needed no such vision of Sudden Death to conjure 
 up melancholy reflections. The time has come for 
 farewells. And first farewell to the gentle reader who has 
 borne with us so patiently. Would that time and space 
 had left us free to dwell on other sides of Eton life : on 
 the Corps, which is not, as the scornful imagine, all 
 ginger-beer and parlour-skittles, but a most profitable 
 method vastly superior to the tin method of playing at 
 toy soldiers : on our stately Chapel and the beauty of its 
 services, the generous religious spirit of the place and the 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 charm of an Eton Sunday : on the intenser joys of football 
 and cricket and fives : on the good fellowship of the 
 evening stroll, when " Good-night ! " rings along the 
 pavement from Barnes' Pool Bridge to the Burning Bush : 
 on the friendly intercourse between boy and master, and 
 all the other interests and pleasures that go to make our 
 daily life so happy. For Eton is the happiest school in 
 the world, because she is the freest. Elsewhere a monitor 
 or a prefect may boast comparative emancipation, the 
 liberty of the loose-box as against the confinement of the 
 stall. But ours is the unfettered freedom of the open 
 pastures. 
 
 Linquenda tellus. In a few short weeks the B. B. 
 Club will be scattered abroad : Bucklebury to Oxford, 
 whence he will climb by the steep and narrow staircase of 
 the Law to a seat in the national Palaver-house : Witstock 
 to Sandhurst, some day to adorn the mess of a certain 
 Hussar regiment on which his heart is set : and Ixworth 
 back to his home in the Midlands, with Constance's 
 flower laid between the leaves of his Bible, there to rule 
 his father's estates and hunt his father's hounds 
 
 , 
 
 i 
 
 " A great broad-shoulder'd genial Englishman, 
 A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep, 
 Fair-hair'd and redder than a windy morn." 
 
 And the familiar faces as we have known them, the 
 calm dignity of the President rising to speak in Pop with 
 a downward glance at the fall of his trouser from knee to 
 ankle, the awful mien and scathing tones of the Vice 
 rebuking some private for loading his rifle with chocolate 
 and therewith bespattering the major's white horse, the 
 reckless smile of the Member sauntering bare-headed 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 across the grass at Lord's to play the joyous but unprofitable 
 game of " tonk-and-go," vowing to smash the face of the 
 pavilion-clock, or be bowled in the attempt : these will 
 soon be pictures in the memory, and nothing more. 
 Farewell to them also. 
 
 And last and hardest of all farewell to Eton herself, 
 the Kindly Mother, who will bid us God-speed, and gather 
 other children in our stead, to grow and learn and play in 
 her quiet garden. 
 
 VALE. 
 
 
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