the boys all dressed in gray uniforms built on the plan of the Confederate army; the hero constantly paraded before their imaginations was Robert E. Lee; discipline was rigidly military; more important, a high standard of honour was insisted upon.  There was one thing a boy could not do at Bingham and remain in the school; that was to cheat in class-rooms or at examinations.  For this offence no second chance was given.  “I cannot argue the subject,” Page quotes Colonel Bingham saying to the distracted parent whose son had been dismissed on this charge, and who was begging for his reinstatement.  “In fact, I have no power to reinstate your boy.  I could not keep the honour of the school—­I could not even keep the boys, if he were to return.  They would appeal to their parents and most of them would be called home.  They are the flower of the South, Sir!” And the social standards that controlled the thinking of the South for so many years after the war were strongly entrenched.  “The son of a Confederate general,” Page writes, “if he were at all a decent fellow, had, of course, a higher social rank at the Bingham School than the son of a colonel.  There was some difficulty in deciding the exact rank of a judge or a governor, as a father; but the son of a preacher had a fair chance of a good social rating, especially of an Episcopalian clergyman.  A Presbyterian preacher came next in rank.  I at first was at a social disadvantage.  My father had been a Methodist—­that was bad enough; but he had had no military title at all.  If it had become known among the boys that he had been a ’Union man’—­I used to shudder at the suspicion in which I should be held.  And the fact that my father had held no military title did at last become known!”

A single episode discloses that Page maintained his respect for the Bingham School to the end.  In March, 1918, as American Ambassador, he went up to Harrow and gave an informal talk to the boys on the United States.  His hosts were so pleased that two prizes were established to commemorate his visit.  One was for an essay by Harrow boys on the subject:  “The Drawing Together of America and Great Britain by Common Devotion to a Great Cause.”  A similar prize on the same subject was offered to the boys of some American school, and Page was asked to select the recipient.  He promptly named his old Bingham School in North Carolina.

It was at Bingham that Page gained his first knowledge of Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and he was an outstanding student in all three subjects.  He had no particular liking for mathematics, but he could never understand why any one should find this branch of learning difficult; he mastered it with the utmost ease and always stood high.  In two or three years he had absorbed everything that Bingham could offer and was ready for the next step.  But political conditions in North Carolina now had their influence upon Page’s educational plans.  Under ordinary conditions he would have