THE dreadful “season of snows and sins” was already beginning to approach again: in other words more scholarship examinations at Oxford and Cambridge began to pile their fat clouds on the horizon. These were the snows: the sins were my own in not taking any intelligent interest in the subjects which would make them “big with blessing.” Certainly I had been sent to school to learn Latin and Greek among other things, but the other things were so vastly more interesting. I was usually about tenth in any form where I happened to be, and I remember a very serious letter from my father (after a series of consecutive tenths) saying that he had always observed that boys who were about tenth, could always do much better if they chose: boys lower in a form were those who often tried very hard, but were deficient in ability. I do not think I was so diabolically minded as to consider this a reason for doing worse, but certainly I declined from that modest eminence where boys who could do better pleasantly sunned themselves, and sank half a dozen places lower. By one of those wonderful coincidences which from time to time nourish starving optimists, it so happened that in the summer of 1884 an unusually large number of the sixth left school, and thus seventeen promotions were made out of the fifth form, the very last of which consisted of myself. With all the dignity and decoration of sixth form upon me, I had somehow justified my existence again, and the stigma of being seventeenth was swallowed up in the glory of being in the sixth. I had a study of my own, instead of being one of a herd in a classroom. I could make small boys fill my brewing kettle for me and run errands, and I could, without incurring criticism, wear my cap at the back of my head.

Something, I fancy, in an address which the headmaster gave to the new sixth form at the beginning of the September term, was said about duties and responsibilities: if it was, it must have rebounded out of one ear without penetration. For the average schoolboy is, I believe, waterproof to such suggestions, if they come from without he will get his idea of his duties and responsibilities purely from his own instinct, or rather from the collective instinct of his contemporaries, and his notion of proper behaviour in himself and others is practically entirely built on what he and they consider to be “good form.” These commandments are the most elusive and variable of decalogues, but usually wholesome, and completely autocratic. Immorality, for instance, at that time was bad form, though language which would have blistered the paint off a sewer, was perfectly permissible, if you wished to indulge in it: bullying was hopelessly beyond the pale, gambling and drinking, which figure so menacingly in those lurid histories designed to make mothers tremble for their innocent lambs, were absolutely unthought of. We (the sixth form generally) were a set of genial and energetic pagans, caring most of all for each other, next for games, but doing quite a decent amount of work; indeed, it was rather the fashion, and became more so, to be industrious in certain well-defined patches.

Nobody took the very slightest interest in such subjects as French or mathematics, and considering the way in which they were taught, it would have been truly remarkable if we had. An aged man, mumbling to himself, wrote out equations and made pictures of Euclidian proposition on a blackboard, apparently for his own amusement, without any reference to his audience. When he had had enough of it, he told us to close all books, and write out the proposition he had demonstrated. Sometimes you could, sometimes you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t very frequently, you had to do it twice and show it up next school. If the aged man remembered to ask for it, you had forgotten to do it, but usually he forgot too. But what it was all about was a blank mystery, until it became necessary to find out, because elementary Euclid and algebra formed a part of the Oxford and Cambridge certificate examination. When that approached, we put our heads together and found out for ourselves.

French was equally hopeless: once a week we prepared a couple of pages of some French history for the headmaster. Whatever French he knew he certainly did not impart: of the spoken language I had picked up enough abroad to be aware that he would have been practically unintelligible to a Frenchman. I believe that both these subjects were admirably taught on the modern side; on the classical side the study of them was a mere farce. But at Latin and Greek we worked quite reasonably and intelligently: it was “good form” to take an interest in them, and it was not thought the least odd if somebody was found reading the Apology of Socrates (in a translation) out of school hours, though it had nothing to do with class-work, or that I treasured a piece of white marble which my sister Nellie on a foreign tour had picked up on the Acropolis.

The real interest of life centred in “the Alley,” a passage running above a couple of classrooms in the school buildings, out of which on each side opened minute studies inhabited by sixth-form in-college boys. Some of these were double studies shared by two occupants, but most were single; inviolable castles if the owner chose to shut the door. Inside there was room for a table, a hanging bookcase, and perhaps three chairs if you sat close; but who would dream of measuring Paradise by cubic contents? Never surely was there a more harmonious democracy, and it was seldom that doors were shut; the inhabitants, unless tied to their books, drifted up and down and round and round like excited bubbles in some loquacious backwater. Within the limits of “good form” every freedom of action and opinion was allowed, and those limits were really very reasonable ones. It must not be supposed that “good form” was ever discussed at all: it was merely the unwritten, unspoken code, which held things together, and undoubtedly the gravest offense against it was a hint of condescension or superiority. If you were so fortunate as to get into the school fifteen or achieve any distinction, “the Alley” pooled the credit, and woe be to any who showed “side” to the Alleyites. If you liked (hardly anybody did) to be extremely neat in dress, to get yourself up to kill, to wear buttonholes, you were perfectly at liberty to do so; but if you showed the least “swank” over your rosebud, the witnesses of your enormity would probably stroll thoughtfully away and return embellished with dandelions and groundsel. That was sarcasm, popularly called “sarc,” and was a weapon ruthlessly employed towards the superior person. No one could stand a conspiracy of “sarc” for long: it was better to mend your ways and reduce your swollen head. Only one member of the Alley was ever known to resist a continual course of “sarc,” and he, poor fellow, was goaded by the shafts of love, for he adored to distraction one of the masters’ daughters who appeared unaware of his existence. This was unusual conduct, but he was at liberty to squander emotion on her if he wished; what roused the Alley to arms, so that they loaded themselves with “sarc,” as with hand grenades, was that he affected to despise all who were not enslaved by some pretty-faced maiden. Then, as was right, he found hairpins mysteriously appearing on his carpet, and heard his Christian name called in faint girlish falsetto from a neighbouring study, and discovered notes with passionate declarations of love and a wealth of suggestive allusions that I would no longer “pollewt” my pen with describing nestling in his coat-pocket. But such was the innate depravity of his amorous heart that he really didn’t seem to mind the most withering “sarc.”... Games were not compulsory in the sixth, and in consequence, though athletes were in the majority, athleticism was no longer automatic, and now a boy would suffer no loss of esteem, or offend any sense of decency, if he chose not to play any game whatever. A wide tolerance for your fellows was the first lesson of the Alley; liberty, equality, and fraternity were its admirable guides to life.

Next year, when, by another intervention of Providence, I suddenly found myself head of my house, with a magnificent apartment next the bathroom for my habitation, the snowstorm of scholarship examinations burst over me. For a suitable inducement in the shape of a scholarship or exhibition, I was prepared to go to New, Magdalen, or Worcester at Oxford, or to King’s College, Cambridge; but not a single one of these ancient (or shall we say antiquated?) seats of learning would, after examining me, put their hands in their pockets in order to secure me. I was very busy at the time, for I was editing The Marlburian and conducting the school “Penny Readings,” and playing football for them and rackets, and not being able to find time for everything I let my school-work slide altogether and, when the depressing results came out, bore failure with admirable fortitude. In other words, I did not care at all; if anything, I was rather pleased, because I began dimly to conceive the possibility of being allowed to stop at school for an extra year, whereas I should normally have left in the summer. But Marlborough was now to me the most amiable of dwellings; there were friends there whom I could not bear the thought of parting with; there were schemes that I could not bear to leave unfulfilled, and I directed all the ingenuity of which I was capable to secure my remaining here for an unheard-of year longer. From being resigned to failure I passed, as my plans matured, into being enraptured with it. A false step, a misplaced interview, might spell ruin, and after much thought I went to the headmaster with a homily all about myself. It was clear that I had not attained a decent standard of scholarship yet; surely my coming years at the University would be more profitable if I was better prepared to take advantage of them? My father was bent on my having a career of some distinction there, and would not he be far more likely to find his ambitions for me realized if I made there the better start that another year at school would give me? Another year now of undiluted classics....

This scheme enlisted his sympathy, and he said he would talk to my house-master about it, who might not, however, want to keep me in such august seniority. But as to that I had no doubt whatever, for this gentleman had only just come to the house, and his seat in the saddle was at present remarkably uncertain. He used to ask members of the sixth, and in especial the head of the house, to go the rounds for him when it was the hour for him to parade the dormitories at night; he would do anything to shirk disciplinary contact if a senior member of the house could accomplish this for him. No senior member of the house felt the slightest nervousness at what so terrified the house-master: we visited the dormitories, sat on a bed here and there, talking to friends, helped a straggler who had not finished a construing lesson for the morning, and eventually went back to the house-master’s room to say good night and report that all was well. Then he gave you a slice of cake, and tried to conceal his pipe, and hoped that nobody in the house smoked (which, as a matter of fact, they didn’t), and everything was very pleasant and comfortable. The house was behaving quite well, because prefects and senior boys had it well in hand; but if I left, my successor as head of the house was bound to be a very mild, spectacled youth, and, without conceit, I felt sure that my house-master would prefer to keep me, who during this last year had managed it quite nicely for him. His attitude came off according to plan, and we had quite an affecting interview.

Then came the clincher to this careful spade-work, and I got both him and the headmaster to write to my father urging him to allow me to stop another year, not only for my own good (interview A), but for the well-being of the house (interview B). The double appeal was successful: it was settled that I should stay for another year, and then go up to King’s College, Cambridge. As I would be over nineteen when the next scholarship examination came round, I was ineligible on account of advanced age, and thus, while the snowstorms were next vexing my contemporaries, I should sit serene and calm on the sunny slopes of antiquity. I had no notion of using this extra year of life (for so it appeared then) for idle or unedifying purposes. I meant to work hard at subjects that would eventually “tell.” I meant also, with a suspicion of priggishness, to make the house streak a meteor-like path across the starry sky of school. We were going to be a model of enlightenment (this was the ambition); we were to win the racket house-cup, and the fives cup, and the gymnasium cup, and the football cup, and the singing cup (for, like the Meistersingers, every house competed in singing), and two vocal quartettes, triumphantly performed, gave a fifth challenge cup. There it was—forty boys were to be drilled into winning every event of this immense pentathlon. A sixth cup, possibly within the range, was the cricket cup; but in the matter of cricket the house generally was no more than a company of optimistic amateurs. The other five cups seemed within the limits of probable achievement, and who knew but that a breezy eleven, rather ignorant of cricket, except for the presence of the best left-hand bowler in the school, might not effect some incredible miracle? Never has anybody’s head been so stuffed full of plans as was mine when I went back a year later than was reasonable for this series of inconceivable excitements.

The head of the school this year was Eustace Miles. We had already been great friends for many terms, and now this friendship ripened into a unique alliance; from morning till night we were together, and seethed in projects, failures and accomplishments. There was no sport or industry in which we were not associated. No matter came up within the jurisdiction of either of us in which each did not consult the other. He was going up for a classical scholarship at King’s, Cambridge, for we had quite settled not to have done with each other when school was over. I had to get to learn some classics somehow, and so together we concocted the most delightful plan, namely, that we should neither of us do any French, mathematics, or history, but should be excused coming into school altogether while such lessons were in progress, devoting ourselves in the privacy of our studies to classics. The headmaster most sensibly saw and sanctioned our point, and consequently we had a whole holiday one day a week, and on two other days only one hour in school. For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, that browsing at will in Attic and Roman pastures, gave me precisely all I had lacked before; the two dead languages stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the sinews and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, and the winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon them. Four years ago Beesly had awakened in me the sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but not till now had the flame spread to the language. That for me had always smouldered and smoked under the damp of grammar and accents; now, when I could learn as I chose, it flared up. Prosody and inflexions, moods and cases, all that was tedious to acquire, need no longer be learned by rule; the knowledge of rules began to dawn on me merely by incessantly coming across examples of them, and I began to learn under the tuition of admiration. The same thrilled interest invaded Latin also, and it was no longer what could be made of the languages in English that attracted me, but what they were in themselves. Such study did not lead to accurate scholarship, but it gave me what was of much greater value to one who did not mean to spend his life in editing school-books, namely, an inkling of the infinite flexibility of language and joy in the cadences of words, while from the scholastic standpoint it added the stimulus which enabled me not to remain at Cambridge such a hopeless dunce at classics as I had hitherto always been. All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives.... With that illumination a great light shone on English also: in the galloping race of composition at home I, at any rate, had much preferred to run than to read, but now I plunged headlong into the sea of English literature, reading fast, reading carelessly, but reading rapturously. I bought the six-volume edition of Browning out of the money I won over school-fives, which should have been devoted to the purchase of a silver cup; a successful competition in rackets landed the works of Dickens, and in the hours when I should naturally have done mathematics and French and history, these shared with Juvenal and Aristophanes the honey of the flying minutes. Then came the need to imitate which always besets the budding author, and if you searched in the proper pages of The Marlburian you would surely disinter some specimens that aimed at Addison and stanzas which could never have found their printer, had there not been in my study a well-thumbed copy of Tennyson’s early lyrics.

There was another by-road for the literary pilgrim: four of us were joint editors, producers, and proprietors of that school paper. Who the two others were I have no idea; it is certain that Eustace and I wrote the greater part of it, and that, with some fine journalistic flair, he, and he alone, caused it to pour money into the pockets of its four editors. Domestically he knew something about printing and pulls and proofs, which had escaped the experience of his friend and the family printing press, and that year The Marlburian, as I hope it is now, was a paying concern. Eustace interviewed an astonished tradesman, paid the printing bills, audited the accounts, and flowed back to his collaborators a Pactolus of large silver pieces. We wrote indignant letters signed “A Parent,” and answered them with withering rejoinders signed “Another Parent”; we invented abuses, and firmly denied them; we cut down the habitual drowsy accounts of house matches to the smallest paragraphs and spread a table of Socratic dialogue, proving that football was the same as cricket and that masters were the slaves of boys; or imagined that a hundred years hence a fragment of “The Princess” was dug up and edited and amended by Dry-as-Dust; or recommended the school generally, when a two-mile run was ordered by the football captain of their houses, to buy a hoop and bowl it along the road, in order to enliven the stupid act of purposeless running. In this latter point we set the example ourselves and bowled nice wooden hoops down the Bath road, thereby for some reason infuriating the staff of masters. Once, I remember, Eustace and I, going out for a run with our hoops, passed the open door of a class-room at an hour when the lower school was at work, on which a demented master sent out two junior boys with orders to capture the hoops and bring them in to him. Now, there was nothing immoral about hoops, nor was there any school rule that forbade their employment, and so we went very briskly along down the Bath road for a mile or two, with two small boys in pursuit, and when they could run no longer we sat down on a gate. They panted up, and said they had been told to take away the hoops and bring them back to Mr. Sharpe, and so, very politely, we said, “Come and take them.” Naturally they could make no serious attempt to take away the hoops of the head of the school and the captain of the Rugby fifteen, and so, after a little conversation, we all came back together. It was all very silly, but why did Mr. Sharpe send two small boys to take away the hoops of two big boys who happened to choose to bowl hoops? We soon got tired of the habit, but it was great fun to write indignant letters to The Marlburian about hoops signed “Magister,” and scathing replies signed “Discipulus.” It made excellent selling stuff for the paper, and boys who had never dreamed of buying a Marlburian before put their threepence down with a spendthrift recklessness, because they knew that there was a correspondence about hoops, with plenty of “sarc” in it. There were real letters as well from dignified Old Marlburians, beginning “Has it come to this?” ...

To all these entrancing topics the editors gave their serious consideration. They herded together for consultation, and rejected each other’s contributions with suave impartiality, and when they had settled what they wished to print, Eustace measured it, and usually said that there was too much. If it was all very precious a double number (price sixpence) was decreed; if not, a Socratic dialogue or some trifle of that kind was cut out. Three out of the four would be very complimentary to the baffled author, and assure him that they found his contribution most amusing, and if that did not soothe the rejection of it, they would grow more candid, and say it was beastly rot. When that was disposed of there might perhaps be a few inches of column to spare, and we inserted an advertisement that a sixth form boy was willing to exchange his hoop (nearly new) for a set of false teeth. Luckily someone remembered that a mathematical master had false teeth, and would be liable to think that this was “sarc” directed at him, and some answers to non-existent correspondents were put in instead. By that time the cake would be finished and the teapot dry, and Eustace took the MSS. to the printers, and I went to conduct a rehearsal of Haydn’s Symphony for the approaching Penny Reading, and ask Harry Irving what he was going to recite at it.

These Penny Readings which took place once a term were an entirely delightful institution. Qui docebant jam docentur, as the Carmen told us, for the whole of this musical and dramatic entertainment was got up, rehearsed (to whatever stage of efficiency), conducted and performed by boys without any help from masters. There were piano solos, part-songs, vocal solos or duets, and perhaps some reading or representation, say, of the trial scene in Pickwick. But this year the Penny Readings included grim and finished recitations by Harry Irving, who “drew” in a manner so unprecedented, that instead of holding them in the “Bradleian,” a hall of but moderate dimensions, Upper School itself, capable of holding the entire body of boys and masters, had to be requisitioned. It fell to my lot to conduct the musical part of the entertainment, and this year we audaciously rehearsed and performed Haydn’s Toy Symphony, in which, for a special treat, we allowed Mr. Bambridge to play the cuckoo. There he sat, rapturously cheered as he mounted to the platform with his little wooden tube, lean and grave with a steady eye fixed on the conductor’s baton. It had been arranged that the cuckoo, otherwise so obedient and punctual in its flutings, should at one point run amuck altogether, and go on saying “cuckoo” in spite of the efforts of the conductor to silence it. On it went till the roars of the audience entirely drowned its voice, and when silence was restored, it gave one more “cuckoo,” pianissimo prestissimo, just to show that it was quite unrepentant.... But more than anything did Harry Irving’s recitations bring down the house. In appearance he was his father, young and amazingly good-looking, and he had all the assurance and grip of a mature actor: he stalked and he paused, he yelled and he whispered, and he withered us with horror in some appalling little soliloquy by a dying hangman, round whose death-bed the ghosts of his victims most unpleasantly hovered. Then in the manner of a parson he gave us a short sermon on the moral lesson “to be drawn from, dear brethren, that exquisite gem of English poetry, ‘Mary had a little larm.’”

The athletic ambitions of the first of these three terms was of course to win the football cup in house-ties, and also all the school matches. Neither quite came off, for the house was beaten in the final, while the school only made a moderate show in its foreign matches. But there was little time for moaning. Close on the heels of that disappointment came the Lent term with its fives, rackets and singing cups, and there was then no cause for anything but jubilation. At Easter came the dreadful fiasco of the Public School rackets in London, and following on that, the house was again knocked out in the final at cricket. Never shall I forget the heaviness of heart with which I came down that day from the cricket-field, due, not to the fact only of defeat—for even if we had won, that sense of finality would have been there—but because for me all the zeal and the struggle, with its failures and successes, of these entrancing school games, was over. Not again could games, so I dimly and correctly realized, have quite that absorbing and pellucid quality which distinguished house matches: there was already forming in my mind, now that the last of these competitions was over, a certain dingy philosophy clouding the brightness, which recognized that games were amusements, to be taken as such. They might give exhilaration and enjoyment, but not again would they produce that unique absorption. I could not imagine again caring quite as much as I had cared during these last six years. Some hour had struck, and not alone for games, but for the multitudinous aims that had been bounded by the chapel wall on one side, the master’s garden on another, the field where was the racket court and the football grounds in winter and the cricket pitches in summer, on the third and fourth sides. There was the angulus terrÆ, which, apart from brief holidays, had constituted the whole of life for the vision of a boy. Apart from Addington, there was nothing in the whole round world that mattered like those few acres, and the glory which exuded out of their very soil.

Dimly I conjectured that in a few months Marlborough would be withdrawn into some bright starry orbit of its own, as far as I was concerned, revolving there with a sundered light in which I should no longer share, and that soon I should peer for it through the fog of the years that drifted across it. Some other orbit was to be mine, which, when I began to move in it, would no doubt have a heaven of its own to scour through, but as yet it had no significance for me; it was dim and uncharted. Still incurably boyish, in spite of the nineteen years which were verging on the twentieth, I felt that I was being cast out of the only place that mattered. I suppose I knew in some dull logical way, that it was otherwise: that inexorable Time which sent me forth out of this mature infancy had something left in store, but to the eyes of nineteen, everyone who is thirty, at any rate, must clearly be a sere and yellow leaf, waiting for an autumnal blast to make an end of him in the fall of withered foliage. Life might be possible up to twenty-five or so, but then beyond doubt senility must be moribund and slobbering. “Thirty at least” was the verdict then: “Thirty at most” was so soon substituted for it. For the first time in my life I had the definite sense of a book read through and loved from cover to cover, being closed, the sense of an “end,” a finished period. Hitherto, change of home or the leaving of a private school had been not an “end” but a beginning: though one experience was finished the opening of a new one, of fresh places, fresh conditions had made the old just slip from the fingers of a careless hand, without sense of loss. But now my fingers clung desperately to what was slipping away: they did not clutch at that which was coming, but tightened, as the smooth days hurtled by, on that which they still just held.

The last game that mattered “frightfully” had been already played, the last number of The Marlburian came out, and while one half of me would have chosen that the full moon of July should know no wane, the other would willingly have seen her turn to ashes, and fall like a cinder from the sky, to match the days from which the glow and the radiance were dying in the frost of the coming departure. Inanimate objects, beloved and familiar, like the row of lime trees in the court with the circular seats round them, my house-study with the copies of Turner water-colours by my sister, the Alley and its noisy merry staircase, began to wear a strange aspect, for, so soon, they would have passed completely into other occupation. Drop by drop, like the sweet drippings from the limes, the honey was oozing from them, leaving empty cells and alien habitations.

In especial there was a certain covered columned passage, a paved and roofed pergola close to the sixth form class-room where so often I had waited for the advent of a friend. In stormy south-westerly weather the rain beat into it, but it was a good meeting-place, for the Alley, the Upper School, the sixth form room and the Bradleian made it a junction for passengers, and there was a board up with school-notices, promotions into the eleven and the fifteen and whatnot, to while away the waiting. A congregation of steps would come there as some form was released, but he was not there: then would come a few scattered steps, but not his. And then he would come round a corner, in a blustering hurry, and say, “Oh, sorry,” and together we went up to the house-study madly alive, and sanely content. Those minutes of anticipation made the columned pergola more vivid than even the house-study or the Alley or the lime trees, and in so short a while it would all be dead, as a piece of scenery remaining on a stage, where others should play their friendly and wholesome parts. If I had had that which in the cant phrase is called “the corporate sense,” I suppose the great thing would have been that generations of others should do as I had done, and I should have said my grace, and got up thankfully from the delicate and vigorous feast. Instead I was Oliver and asked for more, and every year since I have wanted more of some quality that is inseparable from the wonder and sunset of boyhood. But now the sun was notched by the hills over which I must soon climb, where lay the untravelled country: its last rays were level over the plain, and before this last week of July was over, only high up on the peaks of memory away to the east would the rose linger. That, too, so I dismally supposed, would fade presently, but there I was wrong. It has never faded nor lost one atom of its radiance.

There were rejoicings and jubilations to be gone through: the advent of Nellie for prize-giving, in which at last it was my lot to make several excursions to the table where morocco-bound books were stacked. There was a house-supper on the last day of all in celebration of the winning of those challenge cups, which was gratifying also, but below that was the sound of the passing-bell. All that day it sounded, except just at the moment when I should have expected it to be most unbearably funereal. For the friend for whom I had so often waited in the colonnade came up with me to the cricket pavilion, from which I had to take away blazers and bat and cricketing paraphernalia, and having got them stuffed inside my bag, we sat on the steep bank overlooking the field to wait for the first stroke of the chapel-bell. Other groups were straying about the grass, and some came and talked for a bit, and we wished they would go away, because nobody else was wanted just then. It was not that there was anything particular to say, for boys don’t say much to one another, and we lay on the grass, and chewed the sweet ends of it, and when not silent, talked of perfectly trivial things. And at last the friend rolled over on to his face and said:

“Oh, damn!”

“Why?” I asked, knowing quite well.

“Because it will be awful rot without you.”

“You’ll soon find somebody else,” said I.

“Funny,” said he.

“Laugh then,” said I.

He sat up, nursing his knees in his arms, and looking down over the field. Just below was the stretch of grass where house football-ties were played in the winter, to the left was Beesly’s house, and at the bottom of the field the racket court. Beyond and below across the road the chapel and the red school-buildings. Then his eyes came back from their excursion.

“It’s been ripping anyhow,” he said. “Did two fellows ever have such a good time?”

Quite suddenly at that, when the passing-bell should have been loudest, it ceased altogether. The whole of my dismal maunderings about days that were dead and years that were past, I knew to be utterly mistaken. Nothing that was worth having was dead or past at all: it was all here now, and all mine, a possession eternally alive.

“But did they?” he repeated, as I did not answer.

“Never. Nor will. And there’s chapel-bell. Get up.”

He stood up and picked the grass seeds from his clothes.

“Psalms this morning,” he said telegraphically.

“I know. ‘Brethren and companions’ sake.’ Didn’t think you had noticed.”

“Rather. Good old Psalm.”

I took up the cricket-bag, and he pulled at it to carry it. A handle came off.

“Ass,” said I.

“Well, it was three-quarters off already,” said he. “Come on; we shall be late. You can leave it at the porter’s lodge.”

“Oh, may I, really? Thanks awfully,” said I.

“Sarc,” said he.

There was Beesly on the platform next day when I got to the station, and I remembered he had asked me what train I was going by. He just nodded to me, and continued looking at volumes on the bookstall. But just as the whistle sounded, he came to the carriage door.

“Just came to see you off,” he said. “Don’t forget us all.”