"Those who know what our public schools are, will reckon it, I believe, almost incredible that I should be four years at Eton, and remain, as I did, still almost ignorant of what the language of wickedness meant. Mr. Godley's yoke I certainly thought at the time to be a heavy one. Several times each day we were obliged to go across the playing-fields to school, to chapel, or to absence (which was the term by which Etonians will yet understand the calling over the names of the boys at certain times); so that during the daytime, when in health, we could never be more than three hours together without appearing with the boys of the school. Mr. Godley, however, was inexorable in his rule that we should invariably come home immediately after each of these occasions: by this we were kept from much intercourse with other boys. Most grievous then appeared my unhappy lot, in the summer months especially, when we had to pass through the playing-fields, crowded with cricketers, to whom a lower boy, to fag for them and stop their balls, was sure to be an important prize, whose wrath we incurred if we dared despise their call, and run on our way; whilst, if we were but a few minutes late, the yet more terrible sight awaited us of Mr. Godley's angry countenance. We had not exemption from one of these musters, as most boys had who lived at a distance from the school, yet none of them were bound like us to a speedy return home. It seemed like an Egyptian bondage, from which there was no escape; and doubtless the effect was not altogether good upon my character. As might be expected, the more we were required to observe rules and customs different from others, the more did a certain class of big bullies in the school seem to count it their business to watch over us, as though they might be our evil geniuses. A certain set of faces, consequently, I looked upon with a kind of mysterious dread; and I was under a constant sense of being as though in an enemy's country, obliged to guard against dangers on all sides. Shrinking and skulking became my occupation beyond the ordinary lot of little schoolboys, and my natural disposition to be cowardly and spiritless was perhaps increased. I say _perhaps_, for other {8} circumstances might have made me worse; for what I was in the eyes of the masters of public opinion in the school, I really was--a chicken-hearted creature, what, in Eton language, is called a _sawney_. It may be, that had I been from the first in free intercourse among the boys, instead of being a good innocent one, I might have been, what I suppose must be reckoned one of the worst varieties of public-school characters, a mean, dishonourable one. Whatever I may have lost from not being trained, from the first of my Eton life, in the perfect spirit of the place, could I possibly have escaped during that time