As I walked thus full of fancies, the boys singly or in groups kept passing me, smiling, full of delighted excitement and chatter, all intent on themselves and their companions. I heard scraps of their talk, inconsequent names, accompanied with downright praise or blame, unintelligible exploits, happy nonsense. How odd it is to note that when we Anglo-Saxons are at our happiest and most cheerful, we expend so much of our steam in frank derision of each other! Yet though I can hardly remember a single conversation of my school days, the thought of my friendships and alliances is all gilt with a sense of delightful eagerness. Now that I am a writer of books, it matters even more how I say a thing than what I say. But then it was the other way. It was what we felt that mattered, and talk was but the sparkling outflow of trivial thought. What heroes we made of sturdy, unemphatic boys, how we repeated each other's jokes, what merciless critics we were of each other, how little allowance we made for weakness or oddity, how easily we condoned all faults in one who was good-humoured and strong! How the little web of intrigue and gossip, of likes and dislikes, wove and unwove itself! What hopeless Tories we were! How we stood upon our rights and privileges! I have few illusions as to the innocence or the justice or the generosity of boyhood; what boys really admire are grace and effectiveness and readiness. And yet, looking back, one has parted with something, a sort of zest and intensity that one would fain have retained. I felt that I would have given much to be able to have communicated a few of the hard lessons of experience that I have learnt by my errors and mistakes, to these jolly youngsters; but there again comes in the pathos of boyhood, that one can make no one a present of experience, and that virtue cannot be communicated, or it ceases to be virtue. They were bound, all those ingenuous creatures, to make their own blunders, and one could not save them a single one, for all one's hankering to help. That is of course the secret, that we are here for the sake of experience, and not for the sake of easy happiness. Yet one would keep the hearts of these boys pure and untarnished and strong, if one could, though even as one walked among them one could see faces on which temptation and sin had already written itself in legible signs.