The Grange, Mr. Chittenden’s house, was one of the most perfect examples of a real Queen Anne house that I ever saw.  Every room in the house was wood-panelled, and there was some fine carving on the staircase.  The house, with a splendid avenue of limes leading up to it, stood in a large old-world garden, where vast cedar trees spread themselves duskily over shaven lawns round a splashing fountain, and where scarlet geraniums blazed.  Such a beautiful old place was quite wasted as a school.

We were very well treated by both Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden, and we were all very happy at the Grange.  During my first year there one of my elder brothers died.  A child of ten, should death never have touched his family, looks upon it as something infinitely remote, affecting other people but not himself.  Then when the first gap in the home occurs, all the child’s little world tumbles to pieces, and he wonders how the birds have the heart to go on singing as usual, and how the sun can keep on shining.  A child’s grief is very poignant and real.  I can never forget Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden’s extreme kindness to a very sorrowful little boy at that time.

There was one curious custom at Chittenden’s, and I do not know whether it obtained in other schools in those days.  Some time in the summer term the head-boy would announce that “The Three Sundays” had arrived, and must be duly observed according to ancient custom.  We all obeyed him implicity.  The first Sunday was “Cock-hat Sunday,” the second “Rag Sunday,” and the third (if I may be pardoned) “Spit-in-the-pew Sunday.”  On the first Sunday we all marched to church with our high hats at an extreme angle over our left ears; on the second Sunday every boy had his handkerchief trailing out of his pocket; on the third, I am sorry to say, thirty-one little boys expectorated surreptitiously but simultaneously in the pews, as the first words of the Litany were repeated.  I think that we were all convinced that these were regularly appointed festivals of the Church of England.  I know that I was, and I spent hours hunting fruitlessly through my Prayer Book to find some allusion to them.  I found Sundays after Epiphany, Sundays in Lent, and Sundays after Trinity, but not one word could I discover, to my amazement, either about “Cock-hat Sunday” or “Spit-in-the-pew Sunday.”  What can have been the origin of this singular custom I cannot say.  When I, in my turn, became head-boy, I fixed “The Three Sundays” early in May.  It so happened that year that the Thursday after “Cock-hat Sunday” was Ascension Day, when we also went to church, but, it being a week-day, we wore our school caps in the place of high hats.  Ascension Day thus falling, if I may so express myself, within the Octave of “Cock-hat Sunday,” I decreed that the customary ritual must be observed with the school caps, and my little flock obeyed me implicitly.  So eager were some of the boys to do honour to this religious festival, that their caps were worn at such an impossible angle that they kept tumbling off all the way to church.  It is the only time in my life that I have ever wielded even a semblance of ecclesiastical authority, and I cannot help thinking that the Archbishop of Canterbury would have envied the unquestioning obedience with which all my directions were received, for I gather that his own experience has not invariably been equally fortunate.