It was the rule of Mr. Brandiston’s house that, as soon as prayers and supper were over, all boys (excepting the Sixth Form) should return to their rooms and silence should be observed until bedtime. The interval between supper and bedtime was perhaps half an hour. The lights were extinguished at ten, or soon afterwards. Then Mr. Brandiston would begin the tour of his house, looking into all the rooms to assure himself that the boys were in bed, and wishing them ‘Good night.’ It was a kindly practice, and it might have been useful, but it was so methodical as to lose the chief part of its value. The boys knew that he came, and knew the precise hour of his coming. A good many of them were fast asleep before he opened the doors of their rooms--so light and facile is the slumber of boyhood--and it may be suspected that a still larger number feigned to be asleep. Mr. Brandiston, like other masters of boarding houses, had acquired in the process of years a comprehensive insight into the manners and attitudes of boys in bed. The boy who sleeps hidden deep down under the bedclothes, so that it needs a careful investigation to discover that there is a human being in the bed at all; the boy who starts up at the flash of his master’s candle, and makes a fierce attack upon his master’s legs; the boy who mutters ‘What’s that?’ or ‘Go away, do,’ and turns heavily to sleep upon his side again; the boy who sleeps sitting nearly upright or on his back with his arms clasped beneath his head; or the wakeful boy--rare creature, but real--who is seldom asleep, but lies with open vacant eyes the long night through--all these were familiarly known to Mr. Brandiston. He could have given an entertaining lecture upon the varieties of sleep; but, as a rule, the boys, being tired out with the fully occupied days of school life, fell asleep within a few minutes of going to bed, and however rude and rough the beds were at St. Anselm’s, it was their fixed unalterable belief that no other beds in the world were half so easy or soporific. Happy, thrice happy, the sleep of the young! Mr. Brandiston, himself a bad sleeper, had often watched it with envious eyes, and, as he softly shut the door, had whispered to himself ‘God bless them!’