factor in Common Room and every one is moving Heaven and Earth to have him "sacked." What worries me about him is his ability: he writes with considerable success. He confessed to me one day that he only meant to stay one term: "I want copy for a novel I have in my mind--these old fossils with their moth-eaten, stereotyped conservatism give me a grand field. I guess this is just the best Public School in the country for my purpose, but my hat, I shouldn't care to have to stick at it for a year. It's funny to think that you all were alive once as undergraduates." He read a chapter or two of his book to me the other day: he's got the spirit of the place exactly. I wish I had his gift. He sees everything and has the power of sifting his evidence with wonderful accuracy: he misses nothing. Since he came I have given up my Sunday walks with Renton, who talks of nothing but dyspepsia and his own powers of teaching, and have accompanied Rowntree on some of his excursions on his motor-bicycle. We lunch in Scarborough and get into conversation with week-enders. Rowntree looks on all humanity as "copy," and is without any sense of modesty. He picks up loungers in hotel bars, girls behind counters, girls on the pier, tramps, hotel porters, "nuts" in the hotel lounge and all sorts of unexpected people. He always gets some fantastic story out of them: he is as good a story-teller as George Borrow and just as great a liar. His imagination combined with his experience make him a rare raconteur. He doesn't buy many books, but he is not averse from borrowing mine. I only regret that I can never get them back; he is quite shameless in the matter of purloining literature: he takes books out of the school library without "entering them" and soon begins to think that they really belong to him. He reminds me a good deal of a boy called Senhouse who is also unable to bow the knee in the house of Rimmon; he conforms to none of the school regulations and how he has escaped expulsion up to now beats me. At present he is raising for himself untold trouble by making friends with a small boy called Gillman in Hallows' house. He is desperately fond of this child, and waxes quite sentimental over him to me. There is no harm in either of them, and they are as open as the day in their relations with one another: they wait for each other after chapel, hall, and school. They go for long walks together, they contrive to sit together at school lectures and in prep. Hallows and Heatherington have each lectured both of them, and Hallows has caned Gillman frequently, but they refuse to give up the friendship.... Common Room is as usual in a frenzy over it and I have been reported to the Head Master for aiding and abetting them in their scandalous defiance of rules by having them to tea together in my rooms.