At any rate I should prefer to leave rather than break off our relations, so people must just talk and think what they like. Of course the school doesn't like it. They hate any boy having much to do with a master, but Chichester has a will of his own and I rather fancy he will take his own line right through life. Not that he is self-assertive: he is quiet and unassuming, but he always contrives to get his own way. Luckily for me he is in Wade's house, and dear old Wade, who ought to have been a country squire, never denies any one anything; so when the boy goes for leave to come to my rooms he gets it every time without a murmur. The only blow about camp this year is that Chichester won't be there. His people are taking him abroad for the whole of August. I have been bothered a good deal lately about a peculiarly silly habit of mine. Sometimes, in mathematics especially, I get violently angry at intervals because I realize that my sets are not working hard enough. I so rarely punish that of course there is a temptation for boys to slack in present circumstances: when I find that they take advantage of my ideals to practise this trick on me I usually "give tongue" forcibly and "drop on" them as heavily as I can with a quite colossal punishment. This I take down in a book and--after five minutes I've forgotten all about it. The boy always looks contrite at the moment, but I realize that he knows that he won't have to do the punishment at all. There is a silly system here by which one has to enter the names of all the boys one punishes in a book: I simply can't remember to do it. It's like looking at "roll" lists. I'm always slack about checking the reasons that my boys give for their absence. I always believe what a boy tells me. How can you expect boys to tell the truth if you always verify their statements by outside corroborative evidence? It seems to me to be asking for trouble. There seems to be everlasting espionage here. The school sergeant is known to be in the "secret service" of the Head Master, and is popularly supposed to wander about with a pair of field-glasses scouring the countryside for miscreants. This seems a quaint conception of education. Wherever and whenever we meet boys we are expected to extract information from them as to their precise occupation. The only safe place seems to be on the cricket field, and even there you are surrounded by seniors waiting to lash you if you drop a catch or (in their opinion) field badly.