One very strong impression was connected with the only master in the school whom I did not like.  He was a German, and as is the case with others of his nationality, a spray of saliva flew from his lips when he was angry, and seeing this, I would edge away from him in alarm.  Perhaps it was on this account that he treated me with systematic unfairness and set himself the unnecessary task of making me ridiculous in the eyes of the other boys.  One night I was wandering in the playground and heard him playing the violin in his study.  My taste in music was barbarian; I liked comic songs, which I used to sing to myself in a lugubrious voice, and in London the plaintive clamour of the street-organs had helped to make my sorrows rhythmical.  But now, perhaps for the first time, I became aware of the illimitable melancholy that lies at the heart of all great music.  It seemed to me that the German master, the man whom I hated, had shut himself up alone in his study, and was crying aloud.  I knew that if he was unhappy, it must be because he too was an Ishmael, a personality, one of the different ones.  A great sympathy woke within me, and I peeped through the window and saw him playing with his face all shiny with perspiration and a silk handkerchief tucked under his chin.  I would have liked to have knocked at his door and told him that I knew all about these things, but I was afraid that he would think me cheeky and splutter in my face.

The next day in his class, I looked at him hopefully, in the light of my new understanding, but it did not seem to make any difference.  He only told me to get on with my work.

The term drew to a close, and most of the boys in my form-room ticked off the days on lists, in which the Sundays were written in red ink to show that they did not really count.  As time went on they grew more and more boisterous, and wherever I went I heard them telling one another how they were going to spend their holidays.  It was surprising to me that these boys who were so ordinary during term-time should lead such adventurous lives in the holidays, and I felt a little envious of their good fortune.  They talked of visiting the theatre and foreign travel in a matter-of-fact way that made me think that perhaps after all my home-life was incomplete.  I had never been out of England, and my dramatic knowledge was limited to pantomimes, for which these enthusiastic students of musical comedy expressed a large contempt.  Some of them were allowed to shoot with real guns in the holidays, which reminded me of the worst excesses of my brother in Yorkshire.  Examining my own life, I had often come to the conclusion that adventures did not exist outside books.  But the boys shook this comforting theory with their boastful prophecies, and I thought once more that perhaps it was my misfortune that they did not happen to me.  I began to fear that I would find the holidays tame.