In my time the distant view from the chapel terrace was exceedingly beautiful, whilst the immediate foreground was uncompromisingly ugly.  A vegetable garden then covered the space where now the steps of the “Slopes” run down through lawns and shrubberies, and rows of utilitarian cabbages and potatoes extended right up to the terrace wall.  But beyond this prosaic display of kitchen-stuff, in summer-time an unbroken sea of green extended to the horizon, dotted with such splendid oaks as only a heavy clay soil can produce.  London, instead of being ten miles off, might have been a hundred miles distant.  Now, for fifty years London, Cobbett’s “monstrous wen,” has been throwing her tentative feelers into the green Harrow country.  Already pioneer tentacles of red-brick houses are creeping over the fields, and before long the rural surroundings will have vanished beyond repair.

“Ducker,” the Harrow bathing-place, has had scant justice done to it.  It is a most attractive spot, standing demurely isolated amidst its encircling fringe of fine elms, and jealously guarded by a high wooden palisade, No unauthorised person can penetrate into “Ducker”; in summer-time it is the boys’ own domain.  The long tiled pool stretches in sweeping curves for 250 feet under the great elms, a splashing fountain at one end, its far extremity gay with lawns and flower-beds.  I can conceive of nothing more typical of the exuberant joie-de-vivre of youth than the sight of Ducker on a warm summer evening when the place is ringing with the shouts and laughter of some four hundred boys, all naked as when they were born, swimming, diving, ducking each other, splashing and rollicking in the water, whilst others stretched out on the grass, puris naturalibus, are basking in the sun, or regaling themselves on buns and cocoa.  The whole place is vibrant with the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted powers of enjoyment of boyhood.  A school-song set to a captivating waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker.  One verse of it,

    “Oh! the effervescing tingle,
    How it rushes in the veins! 
    Till the water seems to mingle
    With the pulses and the brains,”

exactly expresses the reason why, as a boy, I loved Ducker so.

Unfortunately, I never played cricket for Harrow at “Lords,” as my two brothers George and Ernest did.  My youngest brother would, I think, have made a great name for himself as a cricketer, had not the fairies endowed him at his birth with a fatal facility for doing everything easily.  As the result of this versatility, his ambitions were continually changing.  He accordingly abandoned cricket for steeplechase riding, at which he distinguished himself until politics ousted steeplechase riding.  After some years, politics gave place to golf and music, which were in their turn supplanted by photography.  He then tried writing a few novels, and very successful some of them were, until it finally dawned on him that his real vocation in life was that of a historian.  My brother was naturally frequently rallied by his family on his inconstancy of purpose, but he pleaded in extenuation that versatility had very marked charms of its own.  He produced one day a copy of verses, written in the Gilbertian metre, to illustrate his mental attitude, and they strike me as so neatly worded, that I will reproduce them in full.