At thirteen I said good-bye to the pleasant Grange, and went, as my elder brothers, my father, and my grandfather had done before me, to Harrow.

In the Harrow of the “seventies” there was one unique personality, that of the Rev. John Smith, best-loved of men.  This saintly man was certainly very eccentric.  We never knew then that his whole life had been one long fight against the hereditary insanity which finally conquered him.  In appearance he was very tall and gaunt, with snow-white whiskers and hair, and the kindest eyes I have ever seen in a human face; he was meticulously clean and neat in his dress.  “John,” as he was invariably called, on one occasion met a poorly clad beggar shivering in the street on a cold day, and at once stripped off his own overcoat and insisted on the beggar taking it.  John never bought another overcoat, but wrapped himself in a plaid in winter-time.  He addressed all boys indiscriminately as “laddie,” though he usually alluded to the younger ones as “smallest of created things,” “infinitesimal scrap of humanity,” or “most diminutive of men”; but, wildly eccentric as he was, no one ever thought of laughing at him.  It was just “old John,” and that explained everything.

I was never “up” to John, for he taught a low Form, and I had come from Chittenden’s, and all Chittenden’s boys took high places; but he took “pupil-room” in my house, and helped my tutor generally, so I saw John daily, and, like every one else, I grew very much attached to this simple, saint-like old clergyman.

He went round every room in the house on Sunday evenings, always first scrupulously knocking at the door.  An untidy room gave him positive pain, and the most slovenly boys would endeavour to get their filthy rooms into some sort of order, “just to please old John.”  John was passionately fond of flowers, and one would meet the most unlikely boys with bunches of roses in their hands.  If one inquired what they were for, they would say half-sheepishly, “Oh, just a few roses I’ve bought.  I thought they would please old John; you know how keen the old chap is on flowers.”  Now English schoolboys are not as a rule in the habit of presenting flowers to their masters.  For all his apparent simplicity, John was not easy to “score off.”  I have known Fifth-form boys bring a particularly difficult passage of Herodotus to John in “pupil-room,” knowing that he was not a great Greek scholar.  John, after glancing at the passage, would say, “Laddie, you splendid fellows in the Upper Fifth know so much; I am but a humble and very ignorant old man.  This passage is beyond my attainments.  Go to your tutor, my child.  He will doubtless make it all clear to you; and pray accept my apologies for being unable to help you,” and the Fifth-form boy would go away feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself.  After his death, it was discovered from his diary that John had been in the habit of praying for twenty boys by name, every night of his life.  He went right down the school list, and then he began again.  Any lack of personal cleanliness drove him frantic.  I myself have heard him order a boy with dirty nails and hands out of the room, crying, “Out of my sight, unclean wretch!  Go and cleanse the hands God gave you, before I allow you to associate with clean gentlemen, and write out for me two hundred times, ’Cleanliness is next to godliness.’”