ball.  Big boys reap the glories of paperchases, the small boy gets lost in the bitter weather, on the open moors, or perhaps (as in one historical case) is frozen to death within a measurable distance of the school playground.  And the worst of it is that, as a member of the great school secret society, the small boy can never complain of his wrongs, or divulge the name of his tormentors.  It is in this respect that he resembles a harmless fellow, dragged into the coils of an Anarchist “Inner Brotherhood.”  He is exposed to all sorts of wrongs from his neighbours, and he can only escape by turning “informer,” by breaking the most sacred law of his society, losing all social status, and, probably, obliging his parents to remove him from school.  Life at school, as among the Celtic peoples, turns on the belief that law and authority are natural enemies, against which every one is banded.

The chapter of bullying among boys is one on which a man enters with reluctance.  Boys are, on the whole, such good fellows, and so full of fine unsophisticated qualities, that the mature mind would gladly turn away its eyes from beholding their iniquities.  Even a cruel bully does not inevitably and invariably develop into a bad man.  He is, let us hope, only passing through the savage stage, in which the torture of prisoners is a recognised institution.  He has, perhaps, too little imagination to understand the pain he causes.  Very often bullying is not physically cruel, but only a perverted sort of humour, such as Kingsley, in “Hypatia,” recognised among his favourite Goths.  I remember a feeble foolish boy at school (feeble he certainly was, and was thought foolish) who became the subject of much humorous bullying.  His companions used to tie a thin thread round his ear, and attach this to a bar at such a height that he could only avoid breaking it by standing on tiptoe.  But he was told that he must not break the thread.  To avoid infringing this commandment, he put himself to considerable inconvenience and afforded much enjoyment to the spectators.

Men of middle age, rather early middle age, remember the two following species of bullying to which they were subjected, and which, perhaps, are obsolescent.  Tall stools were piled up in a pyramid, and the victim was seated on the top, near the roof of the room.  The other savages brought him down from this bad eminence by hurling other stools at those which supported him.  Or the victim was made to place his hands against the door, with the fingers outstretched, while the young tormentors played at the Chinese knife-trick.  They threw knives, that is to say, at the door between the apertures of the fingers, and, as a rule, they hit the fingers and not the door.  These diversions I know to be correctly reported, but the following pretty story is, perhaps, a myth.  At one of the most famous public schools, a praepostor, or monitor, or sixth-form boy having authority, heard a pistol-shot