The only bell I liked to hear was the last bell that called us to our brief supper and to bed, for once the light was out and my body was between the sheets I was free to do what I would, free to think or to dream or to cry.  There was no real difference between being in bed at school or anywhere else; and sometimes I would fill the shadows of the dormitory with the familiar furniture of my little bedroom at home, and pretend that I was happy.  But as a rule I came to bed brimming over with the day’s tears, and I would pull the bedclothes over my head so that the other boys should not know that I was homesick, and cry until I was sticky with tears and perspiration.

The discipline at school did not make us good boys, but it made us civilised; it taught us to conceal our crimes.  And as home-sickness was justly regarded as a crime of ingratitude to the authorities and to society in general, I had to restrain my physical weakness during the day, and the reaction from this restraint made my tears at night almost a luxury.  My longing for home was founded on trifles, but it was not the less passionate.  I hated this life spent in walking on bare boards, and the blank walls and polished forms of the school appeared to me to be sordid.  When now and again I went into one of the master’s studies and felt a carpet under my feet, and saw a pleasant litter of pipes and novels lying on the table, it seemed to me that I was in a holy place, and I looked at the hearthrug, the wallpaper, and the upholstered chairs with a kind of desolate love for things that were nice to see and touch.  I suppose that if we had been in a workhouse, a prison, or a lunatic asylum, our aeesthetic environment would have been very much the same as it was at school; and afterwards when I went with the cricket and football teams to other grammar schools they all gave me the same impression of clean ugliness.  It is not surprising that few boys emerge from their school life with that feeling for colour and form which is common to nearly all children.

There was something very unpleasant to me in the fact that we all washed with the same kind of soap, drank out of the same kind of cup, and in general did the same things at the same time.  The school timetable robbed life of all those accidental variations that make it interesting.  Our meals, our games, even our hours of freedom seemed only like subtle lessons.  We had to eat at a certain hour whether we were hungry or not, we had to play at a certain hour when perhaps we wanted to sit still and be quiet.  The whole school discipline tended to the formation of habits at the expense of our reasoning faculties.  Yet the astonishing thing to me was that the boys themselves set up standards of conduct that still further narrowed the possibilities of our life.  It was bad form to read too much, to write home except on Sundays, to work outside the appointed hours, to talk to the day-boys, to cultivate social relationships with the