When I think now of those who were in charge of my education, upon my word I cannot help but be filled with wonder. What did they teach me? What did I ever get from them that I could not have got, with less trouble, for myself? Never once did any of my masters show the faintest interest in me, or make even the most perfunctory attempt to get to know me, to get to know what I was capable of, if I had any definite tastes, if I were good or bad, moral or immoral, intelligent or a fool. What they did instead was to ask me a couple of questions from a book, and, if I failed to answer either of these satisfactorily, keep me in to sit for twenty minutes with my lesson-book open on the desk before me and my thoughts miles away. Of my masters only one, Mr. Johnson, had any distinction, and he, unfortunately, was a mathematician. He had written a “Euclid” so perfect in its expression that he had managed to get a kind of æsthetic charm into the dry bones of geometry. He was an Englishman, but was slightly Jewish in type. He wore a long, flowing beard and moustache, like an early northern chief, and he had small, sleepy, gray eyes, which during school hours were usually closed. Most of his time he passed, either in reverie or slumber, in his chair on a daïs at the end of the room; but when aroused he had, for the unmathematical, a richly terrifying voice, and a disheartening manner of slashing down a long black cane on the desk, within a few inches of your nose. His classes were models of order. Never a faintest sound. In dead silence you played your game of noughts and crosses, or did your Latin composition, or wrote out cricket teams――but you never spoke, and rarely moved. Of all those whose business it was to mould my mind his figure remains the least spoiled by time. I remember the shock I received when, some years after I left school, I came upon Dr. Melling, the head English master, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, sucking an orange, and dressed in garments that Moses or Ikey would have bid for but languidly. When I spoke to him he seemed so narrow, so unimaginative, so unintelligent, that I felt half-ashamed, as one might who has learned by accident a secret he ought never to have known. Even in stature he was curiously shrunken, though he neither stooped nor showed signs of decrepitude or age. But Johnson I can see now, as I saw him so often then, coming up the path between the two front cricket-fields, a large black bag in his hand, which one had been told contained his lunch. I can see him leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, like one of those beautiful owls that ignore from their cage in the Zoo the staring stranger, his beard spread out over his waistcoat, his hands folded on his stomach. Johnson was a gentleman, and, though he knew nothing of, and cared little for, boys, if chance brought him into temporary relation with one, even a very small and idle one, he took it for granted that he was a gentleman too, and in his deep, slow, musical