To this graphic description I will add a second one.  “He was a splendid all-round athlete,” says another friend, who knew him at this time, in the British and Foreign School Society’s London college.  “Six feet two or three in height, and with a fine muscular development, he could box, wrestle, fence, or row with all comers, and beat them with ridiculous ease.  No one could have been made to believe that he would die, physically worn out, before he was forty.  His intellectual mastery was as unquestioned as his physical superiority; he always topped the examination lists, to the chagrin of some of the lecturers, whom he teased sadly by protesting against injustice the moment it peeped out, by teaching all the good young men to smoke prodigiously, by scattering revolutionary verses about the college, and finally by collecting and burning in one grand bonfire every copy of an obnoxious text-book under which the students had long suffered.”

This was indeed the germ of the man as we all knew him long afterwards.

Runciman left the college to take up the mastership of a London Board School in a low part of Deptford; and here he soon gained an extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums in London.  Mr. Thomas Wright, the “Journeyman Engineer,” has already told in print elsewhere the story of Runciman’s descent into the depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off.  From the children, his good influence extended to the parents; and it was an almost every-day occurrence for visitors from the slums to burst into the school to fetch the master to some coster who was “a-killin’ his woman.”  The brawny young giant would dive into the courts where the police go in couples, clamber ricketty stairs, and “interview” the fighting pair.  “His plan was to appeal to the manliness of the offender, and make him ashamed of himself; often such a visit ended in a loan, whereby the ‘barrer’ was replenished and the surly husband set to work; but if all efforts at peacemaking were useless, this new apostle had methods beyond the reach of the ordinary missionary—­he would (the case deserving it) drop his mild, insinuating, persuasive tones, and not only threaten to pulp the incorrigible blackguard into a jelly, but proceed to do it.”

Runciman, however, was much more in fibre than a mere schoolmaster.  He worked hard at his classes by day; he worked equally hard by night at his own education, and at his first attempts at journalism.  He matriculated at London University, and passed his first B.Sc. examination.  At one and the same time he was carrying on his own school, in the far East End, contributing largely to an educational paper, The Teacher, and writing two or three pages a week in Vanity Fair, which he long sub-edited.  His powers of work were enormous, and he systematically overtaxed them.