The book had been carefully arranged.  As I turned over the leaves, there came back the memory of holiday-evenings and the interested questionings of sisters over each new face or scene; and the kind fingers which did the pasting-in; and the care with which we made portrait and landscape fit into and illustrate one another.  And what memories, what impressions, strong and clear as yesterday’s, clung to each succeeding view!  The Spire—­that “pinnacle perched on a precipice”—­with its embosoming trees, as one had so often seen it from the North-Western Railway, while the finger of fate, protruding from the carriage window, pointed it out with—­“That’s where you will go to school.”  And, years later, came the day when one travelled for the first time by a train which did not rush through Lyonness Station (then how small), but stopped there, and disgorged its crowd of boys and their confusion of luggage, and oneself among the rest, and one’s father just as excited and anxious and eager as his son.

A scurry for a seat on the omnibus or a tramp uphill, and we find ourselves abruptly in the village street.  Then did each page as I turned it over bring some fresh recollection of one’s unspeakable sense of newness and desolation; the haunting fear of doing something ludicrous; the morbid dread of chaff and of being “greened,” which even in my time had, happily, supplanted the old terrors of being tossed in a blanket or roasted at a fire.  Even less, I venture to think, was one thrilled by the heroic ambitions, the magnificent visions of struggle and success, which stir the heroes of schoolboy novels on the day of their arrival.

Here was a view of the School Library, with its patch of greensward separating it from the dust and traffic of the road.  There was the Old School with its Fourth Form Room, of which one had heard so much that the actual sight of it made one half inclined to laugh and half to cry with surprise and disappointment.  There was the twisting High Street, with its precipitous causeway; there was the faithful presentment of the fashionable “tuck-shop,” with two boys standing in the road, and the leg of a third caught by the camera as he hurried past; and, wandering through all these scenes in the album as one had wandered through them in real life, I reached at last my boarding-house, once a place of mystery and wonderful expectations and untried experiences; now full of memories, some bright, some sad, but all gathering enchantment from their retrospective distance; and in every brick and beam and cupboard and corner as familiar as home itself.

The next picture, a view of the School Bathing-place, carried me a stage onward in memory to my first summer quarter.  Two terms of school life had inured one to a new existence, and one began to know the pleasures, as well as the pains, of a Public School.  It was a time of cloudless skies, and abundant “strawberry mashes,” and dolce far niente in that sweetly-shaded pool, when the sky was at its bluest, and the air at its hottest, and the water at its most inviting temperature.