My other visitor, who came a day or two later, was a very different type of man.  He was a young, vigorous, healthy creature, who had lately gone as a master to a big public school.  He came at my invitation, being the son of an old friend of mine.  He, too, spent a day with me, and left on my mind a very different impression, namely, that I should grow to respect and like him the more that I saw of him.  There was nothing insincere or lacking in genuineness about him.  I felt his solidity, his loyalty, his uprightness very strongly.  But he exhibited on first acquaintance—­due no doubt to a sturdy British shyness—­all the qualities that make us so detested upon the Continent, and that lead the more expansive foreigner, who only sees the superficial aspect of the Englishman, to think of us as a brutal nation.  He was an odd mixture of awkwardness and complacency, a desire to be courteous struggling with a desire to show his independence; he had no ease of manner, no bonhomie, but a gruff and ugly kind of jocosity, which I am sure was not really natural to him, but was his protest against the possibility of my considering him to be shy.  He seemed anxious to show that he was as good a man as myself, which I was quite ready to take for granted.  He jested about the dulness of the country; said that he thought it made people jolly mouldy.  He did not see that it was a pity to press that fact upon me; the truth was that he was thinking of himself for the time being, though he was no egoist.  And whereas the courtly egoist pays you compliments first and then returns to a more congenial self-contemplation, my burly young friend would, I have not the slightest doubt, grow more companionable and considerate every day that one knew him.  But his manner was the manner of the common-room and the cricket field, that odd British humour, that, without meaning to be unkind, thrusts its darts clumsily in the weak points of the armour.  It is this, I think, that makes English public school life so good a discipline, if one unlearns its methods as soon as one has done with it, because it makes men tolerant of criticism and even ridicule; its absence of sentiment makes them tough; its absence of courtesy makes them strong.

But I did not like it at the time.  He surveyed my belongings with good-humoured contempt.  He said he did not care for fiddling about a garden himself, and at my fowl-house he jested of fleas.  In my library he said he had no time for poking about with books.  I asked him about his life at P——­ and he assured me it was not half bad; that the boys were all right if you knew how to take them; and he told me some pleasant stories of some of his inefficient colleagues.  He said that a good deal of the work was rot, but that they had a first-rate cricket pitch, and a splendid Pro.