Having discovered that the boys at Studley were much more grown-up than he had expected, Philip was not altogether surprised to find that some of the masters were incredibly young--not to say childish. There was Mr. Brett, his Housemaster. Mr. Brett was a typical product of a great system--run to seed. British public schools are very rightly the glory of those who understand them, but they are the despair of those who do not. Generally speaking, they produce a type of man with no special propensities and consequently no special fads. He has been educated on stereotyped and uncommercial lines. He is not a specialist in any branch of knowledge. His critics say that he is unfitted for any profession; that he cannot write a business letter; that he is frequently incapable of expressing himself in decent English. But--public-school tradition has taught him to run straight and speak the truth. The fagging system has taught him to obey an order promptly. The prefectorial system has taught him to frame an order and see that it is carried out. Games have taught him to play for his side and not for himself. The management of games has instilled into him the first principles of organisation and responsibility. Taking him all round, he is the very man we want to run a half-educated empire. Possibly these truths had been known to Mr. Brett in his early days. But, as already stated, his principles had run to seed. In the vegetable world,--of which schoolmasters are dangerously prone to become distinguished members,--whenever judicious watering and pruning are lacking, time operates in one of two ways. A plant either withers and wilts, or it shoots up into a monstrous and unsightly growth. In Mr. Brett's intellectual arboretum every shrub had wilted save two--Classics and cricket. These twain, admirable in moderation, had grown up like mustard trees, and now overshadowed the whole of Mr. Brett's mental outlook. In his House he devoted his ripe scholarship and untiring care exclusively to boys who were likely to do well in the Sixth: his mathematicians and scientists were left to look after themselves. French and German he openly described as "a sop to the parental Cerberus." His Modern-Side boys forgave the slight freely--in fact, they preferred it; and their heavily supervised classical brethren envied them their freedom. But cricket was a different matter. Mr. Brett had probably begun by regarding Classics as the greatest intellectual, and cricket as the greatest moral, stimulus in the schoolboy world--a common, and, on the whole, perfectly tenable, attitude of mind. But by the time that Philip came under his charge it is greatly to be feared that he regarded both as nothing more than a means to an end--Classics as an avenue to Scholarships and House advertisement, cricket as an admirable instrument wherewith to lacerate the feelings of other Housemasters.