The government of the school is very like that at Winchester. The Captain of the College has much the same duties as the Prefect of Hall, and is aided by the other best scholars. The oppidans have also a Captain, but he is under the Captain of the College. Besides this, the houses have each a Captain, as the Winchester houses, have Prefects. Of course it does not always happen that the man who leads his house in scholarship is man enough to rule the rest; but if he is not, the leading athletes step in and take matters into their own hands. [Illustration: THE QUADRANGLE OF THE "COLLEGE."] The punishment masters give for small offences is _poenas_--that is, lines of Latin or Greek to write out. In extreme cases the head master "swishes" a boy with a lot of birch twigs tied together. In time past swishing seems to have been about the only means of discipline, and the head master had a regular block for the purpose. One night a lot of old Etonians, who had been celebrating a cricket victory, broke into the room where the block was, and carried it off to London. There they hired rooms and founded an Eton Block Society, to which no one could belong who had not been swished on the block at school. What Wykehamists call _tunding_, Etonians call _smacking_. The only difference is that instead of standing up, the culprit sometimes has to put his head under a table, while the Captain rushes across the room with uplifted rod. Etonians say that though smacking sometimes draws blood, the worst part of the punishment is the suspense of waiting between blows with your head under the table. The offences punished by smacking are disorder and disobedience in the house. On an average, the head master has only half a dozen boys or so to swish each term, and the average boy is not smacked more than a dozen times during his six years at Eton. Many people, of course, think bodily punishment very brutal, but I never knew a public-school boy or a master who did not approve of it as practised nowadays. In fact, you could hardly enlist the older boys on the side of law and order without giving them a means of discipline which the younger boys respect; and if you didn't do this, you would have to give up the best parts of the public schools.