Mr. Brandiston, or ‘old Brandiston,’ if for once it may be permitted to call him so, took a definite and precise view of the duties of school life. His formality of view was rather like his formal manner of going round his house at night. He held that boys ought to work and ought to play. If a boy both worked well and played well, he set him on a pedestal in his affections. If he either worked well or played well, he regarded him as a not unworthy member of his house. But if a boy was not distinguished in work or in play, it was Mr. Brandiston’s opinion that he ought to have gone to some other house. Yet even this is not a complete exposition of Mr. Brandiston’s educational theory. For he expected his athletes to work with sufficient assiduity to obtain respectable places in the school, and he expected his scholars to follow the regular recognised lines of public school education. He had no idea of any athletes who were not cricketers or football players. He had no idea of any scholars who were not good at Latin and Greek, or at mathematics; he was sometimes suspected of not setting much store even by mathematics. It would have been as disagreeable to him that any of his pupils should achieve distinction in Chemistry or German as that they should achieve it at hoops or marbles. He was a worshipper of the _mens sana in corpore sano_. The thing which he disliked most cordially was ‘loafing;’ but under ‘loafing’ he included not only idling about the street or lolling in the confectioners’ shops, but the irregular studious habits of boys who sat reading books in their rooms or in the library, instead of taking part in the games. Such being Mr. Brandiston’s theory of school life, it is easy to imagine what sort of language he would address to his two pupils, Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley, when they were successively called into his study on the morning after the first night which they had spent as schoolfellows and companions in the same room. He had purposely placed them together, not so much from the love of paradox as on principle, because it was a fixed article of his belief that boys of widely different characters and antecedents, by being placed together, did each other good, rubbing off angles (as he said), the shy scholar becoming more a man of the world, and the athletic aristocrat imbibing a qualified love of learning. To Harry Venniker, who entered the study with his usual sunny smile, Mr. Brandiston expressed the hope that his mother, whose delicacy he had heard of, was better; he alluded to his father and other members of his family who had been at St. Anselm’s; then he added: ‘I dare say you will soon make friends, or find them ready made in the house. I shall expect you to work and get up the school, for the credit of the house. I hear you are a good cricketer, a lefthand bowler; is that true?’ Harry said ‘Yes, sir, I bowl a little,’ with a flush of pleasure mantling upon his cheek.