Now the Blue-Coat boys are a curiosity to every sight-seer in London—­and have been for these hundred years and more.  Their long-tailed blue coats, buckle-shoes, and absence of either hats or caps bring the Yankee up with a halt.  To conduct an American around to the vicinity of Christ’s Hospital and let him discover a “Blue-Coat” for himself is a sensation.  The costume is exactly the same as that worn by Edward, “the Boy King,” who founded the school; and these youngsters, like the birds, never grow old.  You lean against the high iron fence, and looking through the bars watch the boys frolic and play, just as visitors looked in the Eighteenth Century; and I’ve never been by Christ’s Hospital yet when curious people did not stand and stare.  And one thing the Blue-Coats seem to prove, and that is that hats are quite superfluous.

One worthy man from Jamestown, New York, was so impressed by these hatless boys that he wrote a book proving that the wearing of hats was what has kept the race in bondage to ignorance all down the ages.  By statistics he proved that the Blue-Coats had attained distinction quite out of ratio to their number, and cited Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb and many others as proof.  This man returned to Jamestown hatless, and had he not caught cold and been carried off by pneumonia, would have spread his hatless gospel, rendering the name of Knox the Hatter infamous, and causing the word “Derby” to be henceforth a byword and a hissing.

When little Charles Lamb tucked the tails of his long blue coat under his belt and played leap-frog in the school-yard every morning at ten minutes after ’leven, his sister, wan, yellow and dreamy, used to come and watch him through these selfsame iron bars.  She would wave the corner of her rusty shawl in loving token, and he would answer back and would have lifted his hat if he had had one.  When the bell rang and the boys went pellmell into the entry-way, Charles would linger and hold one hand above his head as the stone wall swallowed him, and the sister knowing that all was well would hasten back to her work in Little Queen Street, hard by, to wait for the morrow when she could come again.

“Who is that girl always hanging ’round after you?” asked a tall, handsome boy, called Ajax, of little Charles Lamb.

“Wh’ why, don’t you know—­that, wh’ why that’s my sister Mary!”

“How should I know when you have never introduced me!” loftily replied Ajax.

And so the next day, at ten minutes after ’leven, Charles and the mighty Ajax came down to the fence, and Charles had to call to Mary not to run away, and Charles introduced Ajax to Mary and they shook hands through the fence.  And the next week Ajax, who was known in private life as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called at the house in Little Queen Street where the Lambs lived, and they all had gin and water, and the elder Lamb played the harpsichord, a secondhand one that had been presented by Mr. Salt, and recited poetry, and Coleridge talked the elder Lamb under the table and argued the entire party into silence.  Coleridge was only seventeen then, but a man grown, and already took snuff like a courtier, tapping the lid of the box meditatively and flashing a conundrum the while on the admiring company.