it in the morning nor hardly one sentence of the sermon, but the one in the evening was I Cor. i. 23.  I believe it was a farewell sermon, but I am not sure.  Mrs. Tate has looked through my clothes and left in the trunk a great many that will not be wanted.  I have had 3 misfortunes in my clothes etc. 1st, I cannot find my tooth-brush, so that I have not brushed my teeth for 3 or 4 days, 2nd, I cannot find my blotting paper, and 3rd, I have no shoe-horn.  The chief games are, football, wrestling, leap frog, and fighting.  Excuse bad writing.

    Yr affec’ brother Charles.

    To SKEFF [a younger brother, aged six].

    My dear Skeff,—­Roar not lest thou be abolished.  Yours,
    etc.,—.

The discomforts which he, as a “new boy,” had to put up with from his school-mates affected him as they do not, unfortunately, affect most boys, for in later school days he was famous as a champion of the weak and small, while every bully had good reason to fear him.  Though it is hard for those who have only known him as the gentle and retiring don to believe it, it is nevertheless true that long after he left school his name was remembered as that of a boy who knew well how to use his fists in defence of a righteous cause.

As was the custom at that time, Charles began to compose Latin verses at a very early age, his first copy being dated November 25, 1844.  The subject was evening, and this is how he treated it:—­

Phoebus aqua splendet descendens, aequora tingens
Splendore aurato.  Pervenit umbra solo. 
Mortales lectos quaerunt, et membra relaxant
Fessa labore dies; cuncta per orbe silet. 
Imperium placidum nunc sumit Phoebe corusca. 
Antris procedunt sanguine ore ferae.

These lines the boy solemnly copied into his Diary, apparently in the most blissful ignorance of the numerous mistakes they contained.

The next year he wrote a story which appeared in the school magazine.  It was called “The Unknown One,” so it was probably of the sensational type in which small boys usually revel.

Though Richmond School, as it was in 1844, may not compare favourably in every respect with a modern preparatory school, where supervision has been so far “reduced to the absurd” that the unfortunate masters hardly get a minute to themselves from sunrise till long after sunset, yet no better or wiser men than those of the school of Mr. Tate are now to be found.  Nor, I venture to think, are the results of the modern system more successful than those of the old one.  Charles loved his “kind old schoolmaster,” as he affectionately calls him, and surely to gain the love of the boys is the main battle in school-management.

The impression he made upon his instructors may be gathered from the following extracts from Mr. Tate’s first report upon him: