If, after that, the reader does not agree with me that it is a fine thing to be a British lad, with his cricket, his football, his occasional black eyes, his surreptitious feeding, his long-drawn accounts with the lemonade and ginger-wine merchant, his chatter, and escapades, I can only advise that misguided individual to send his son with all haste to Stanislas, and let him be turned out in its approved fashion, a first-rate, consummate prig and humbug, a well-mannered, French-speaking young hypocrite, perfected in the art of duplicity and self-repression, who, on the order of the Marist Fathers, only bestows his friendship on those worthy of it—individuals, it is to be hoped, of his own self-conscious, sanctimonious way of thinking. He has been bred to calculate the value of every action and every word, for each leads to punishment or reward. He has never, for five mortal minutes, been permitted to show himself for the young barbarian he is. He is a pious old diplomat, a rascal in _posse_, a sage in _esse_, when he ought to be a simple, high-spirited, or dreaming child. Between his spiritual readings, his meditations, his confessions, church services, retreats, and rigid discipline, whose control of every minute only ceases when the poor martyr enters the lovely land of dreams,—where the Marists, if they could, would follow him, to see that imagination played no tricks on their training, and that in that world of vagaries and topsyturvyism he was still the pious, silent, and obedient lad they had formed,—he is not a form of boyhood it is pleasant to contemplate. He is allowed fifteen minutes to dress of a morning, under watch, to see “that he dresses promptly and decently beside his bed,” and out of that there is not much time for ablutions. Possibly, like the kings of France, his washing consists of ten fingers dipped into a basin no larger than a milk-bowl. In class he must make no movement of foot or desk, his mind must not wander, he may not open any other book but the class-book in use, he must not draw, or give himself up to any frivolous occupation—presumably verse-making. If he has need to open his desk, he must only lift the lid half-way, and never lock it, as the prefect visits it once a week. He washes his feet once a week and his body once a month, and in summer bathes twice a week. In the parlour he can be visited only by his parents, or persons duly authorised by his parents, and when he goes home of a Sunday he must be escorted from the college and back by a “person of confidence,” furnished with a signed and dated letter. This person can under no circumstances be accepted if a young man.