My father and mother took us down to school.  It was a fine place at Mortlake, called Temple Grove, near Richmond Park.  Mortlake was hardly more than an old-fashioned village then, in the country, not joined to London as it is now by streets and rows of villas.  It was a place of big suburban mansions, with high walls everywhere, cedars looking over, towering chestnuts, big classical gate-posts.  Temple Grove, so called from the statesman, the patron of Swift, was a large, solid, handsome house with fine rooms, and large grounds well timbered.  Schoolrooms and dormitories had been tacked on to the house, but all built in a solid, spacious way.  It was dignified, but bare and austere.  We arrived, and went in to see the headmaster, Mr. Waterfield, a tall, handsome, extremely alarming man, with curled hair and beard and flashing eyes.  He was a fine gentleman, a brilliant talker, and an excellent teacher, though unnecessarily severe.  I had been used to see my father, who was then himself headmaster of Wellington College, treated with obvious deference; but Waterfield, who was an old family friend, met him with a dignified sort of equality.  My parents went in to luncheon with the family.  My brother and I crawled off to the school dinner; he of course had many friends, and I was plunged, shy and bewildered, into the middle of them.  There were over a hundred boys there.  Some of them seemed to me alarmingly old and strong; but my brother’s friends were kind to me, and I remember thinking at first that it was going to be a very pleasant sort of place.  Then in the early afternoon my parents went off; we went to the station with them, and I said good-bye without any particular emotion.  It seemed to me a nice easy kind of life.  But as my brother and I walked away, between the high-walled gardens, back to the school, the first shadow fell.  He was strangely silent and dull, I thought; and then he turned to me, and in an accent of tragedy which I had never heard him use before, he said, “Thirteen weeks at this beastly place!”

I took a high place for my age, and after due examination in the big schoolroom, where four masters were teaching at estrades, with little rows of lockered desks much hacked and carved, arranged symmetrically round each, the big fireplace guarded with high iron bars, I was led across the room, and committed to the care of a little, pompous, stout man, with big side-whiskers, a reddish nose, and an air half irritable, half good-natured, in a short gown, who was holding forth to a class.  It was all complete:  I had my place and my duty before me; and then gradually day by day the life shaped itself.  I had a little cubicle in a high dormitory.  There was the big, rather frowsy dining-room, where we took our meals; a large comfortable library where we could sit and read; outside there were two or three cricket fields, a gravelled yard for drill, a gymnasium; and beyond that stretched what were called “the grounds,” which seemed to me then