parted with something, a sort of zest and intensity that one would fain have retained.  I felt that I would have given much to be able to have communicated a few of the hard lessons of experience that I have learnt by my errors and mistakes, to these jolly youngsters; but there again comes in the pathos of boyhood, that one can make no one a present of experience, and that virtue cannot be communicated, or it ceases to be virtue.  They were bound, all those ingenuous creatures, to make their own blunders, and one could not save them a single one, for all one’s hankering to help.  That is of course the secret, that we are here for the sake of experience, and not for the sake of easy happiness.  Yet one would keep the hearts of these boys pure and untarnished and strong, if one could, though even as one walked among them one could see faces on which temptation and sin had already written itself in legible signs.

The cricket drew to an end; the shadows began to lengthen on the turf.  The mimic warriors were disbanded.  The tea-tables made their appearance under the elms, where one was welcomed and waited upon by cheerful matrons and neat maidservants, and delightfully zealous and inefficient boys.  One had but to express a preference to have half-a-dozen plates pressed upon one by smiling Ganymedes.  If schools cannot alter character, they certainly can communicate to our cheerful English boys the most delightful manners in the world, so unembarrassed, courteous, easy, graceful, without the least touch of exaggeration or self-consciousness.  I suppose one has insular prejudices, for we are certainly not looked upon as models of courtesy or consideration by our Continental neighbours.  I suppose we reserve our best for ourselves.  I expressed a wish to look at some of the new buildings, and a young gentleman of prepossessing exterior became my unaffected cicerone.  He was not one who dealt in adjectives; his highest epithet of praise was “pretty decent,” but one detected an honest and unquestioning pride in the place for all that.

Perhaps the best point of all about these schools of ours, is that the aspect of the place and the tone of the dwellers in it does not vary appreciably on days of festival and on working days.  The beauty of it is a little focused and smartened, but that is all.  There is no covering up of deficiencies or hiding desolation out of sight.  If one goes down to a public-school on an ordinary day, one finds the same brave life, the same unembarrassed courtesy prevailing.  There is no sense of being taken by surprise; the life is all open to inspection on any day and at any hour.  We do not reserve ourselves for occasions in England.  The meat cuts wholesomely and pleasantly wherever it is sampled.

The disadvantage of this is that we are misjudged by foreigners because we are seen, not at our best, but as we are.  We do not feel the need of recommending ourselves to the favourable consideration of others; not that that is a virtue, it is rather the shadow of complacency and patriotism.