A bell signalizes tea and the end of school. A hurried repast, for physical training follows hard on the top of it, a compulsory form of exercise that most boys frankly detest. After twenty minutes of this the preparation bell goes, and excitement is rife to see whether it is "The Cadger" or "Hopeless George" on duty. If the former, work and the right work has to be attempted: if the latter, novels appear as if by magic and work is given, for an ecstatic hour, the go-by. Another bell (the bell is so constantly in use that a special man has to be kept who does nothing else but attend to this department) summons the school to evening chapel, a repetition of the morning roll-call, except that a lusty roar in a well-known hymn will testify to the Almighty that there are 300 boys who are well pleased that "another ruddy day is o'er." As a matter of fact it is not "o'er," for a further hour of preparation in the privacy, however, of their studies this time awaits them. Pathetic indeed is the sight of the tired-out wan faces of the Modern Shell boy, whose head can be seen nodding over the page of a dull grammar, trying in vain to keep awake and remember the consequences that will accompany his ignorance on the morrow if he forgets what a quasipassive or oxymoron is. At last, at ten o'clock the bell rings once more and with a burst of energy he flings his book aside and rushes upstairs only, in all probability, to find that it is his duty to keep "nixes-watch," that is, to stand near the end of the dormitory until nearly midnight to listen for the step of the House-master, who might otherwise pry into practices that would fill his complacent mind with disquiet. About midnight, worn out, yet not a whit improved in body, soul, or mind the luckless wight will be allowed to get into bed, to sleep, perchance to dream of a new regime, of a better order of things, where life will not be one dull, eternal round of uselessness, useless knowledge, useless punishments, useless games, useless virtues, useless vices, useless restraint, useless discipline, but free, progressive, happy, where no such things take place as have taken place in this absolutely truthful picture I have drawn of a day in the life of a boy in the Modern Shell. EPILOGUE _Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. Under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the Universe._--"The World Set Free." MODERN SHELL: TO-MORROW