That school was in many things an image of life. All the nicknames and jokes and daring comments sprang from the obscurity of the lower forms and were anonymous. We elder and upper boys had a certain sobriety that preserved us in staid decorum. If one of us in class was laboriously translating an indecent passage in Lucian's Fables; from the lower end of the class, which never even tried to translate anything, would come a suppressed chuckle that would make our form teacher very uneasy. I fancy it is these idle boys, with their preternatural acuteness for life and reality, and the confidence that results, who afterwards become the successful men. Most of their jokes were innocent enough. One morning before breakfast in the playground when it was very cold, I found a little gathering of them round a big burly boy in an aggressively thick overcoat, and all were busy ostentatiously spreading out their hands and rubbing them as if before a good fire, the big boy looking very sheepish and helpless. An impudent Irish boy called out 'Heat by radiation, Yeats.' The day before the head-master had given us a chemical lesson on the properties of heat. And the nicknames! One boy was known as 'King.' He had red hair and at first was called the 'Prairie on fire.' That was too long and it became 'King Rufus' and finally 'King,' and he went by no other name. Another was called 'Sin' which changed to 'Satan,' and 'Satan' he remained: a quiet dull boy, ugly and kindly, hulking in all his ways and movements. It arose in this way. Every week the neighbouring clergyman came to spend an hour in teaching us religion, and when he asked what Judas carried in his bag this boy answered 'Sin.' There may have been mines of sensibility in that boy. It was a bold idea for a schoolboy to suppose Judas had carried Sin in his bag; but he belonged to the commercial side of the school where they learned nothing and had an easy time. We who worked at Latin and Greek went through much suffering. In those days the classics were taught after the crudest methods. Having learned some grammar, the declensions, and verbs, and done a few sentences in Delectus, the Life of Hannibal by Cornelius Nepos was thrust into our hands and the tribulation began. Without the constant menace of the cane no healthy minded boy would have faced the difficulties of our task. To fit the verb to the noun, and the adjectives to the noun, and worry through all the participles, and prepositions, and concords, and these through a long sentence in which every word seemed to be wrongly placed, without any help, all alone by yourself, under a rule of silence, so that you could not consult your neighbour, was no end of a puzzle. Henry James' sentences are difficult, but the difficulty is nothing to the difficulty of a young boy with a Latin sentence. And we were all young boys not in the least interested in the fortune of Hannibal, the Latin mind being as strange to us as the