Francis’ name had been entered for Mr. Townshend’s house at Eton. This was in ’41, only three years before my marriage, so he was lucky to be able to get in so early. Mr. Townshend was dead, and his successor, Mr. Cubitt, had retired, but I was told that the spirit of Mr. Frodsham’s house (as it then was) remained excellent. Although it could not compete with the classical tradition of Downside, and had yielded to Tonbridge the palm of merely numerical superiority, Eton was still the premier school of England. The reputation which it had enjoyed under “flogging Headmasters” like Lyttelton had not deserted it in our more humanitarian days. I was a proud mother when I went down for Francis’ first Fourth of June! Old Lord Billericay, I remember, was with me, and it was interesting to note all the changes that had happened since his time, and the indignation which they provoked in the breast of that unbending old Conservative. I remember, for example, that “Pop” were now allowed to wear calf shoes; that notices were put up in the right hand as well as in the left-hand window of the School Bookshop; that the counter in “Little Brown’s” had been moved back six inches in order to make more room for customers; that the boys were allowed to wear “change” at “absence”; that the railings round the statue of the Founder in School Yard had been renewed; that the procession of boats started a quarter of an hour earlier than it used to; that the façade of the School Hall (a fascinating building, in the florid style of the early days of this century) had been cleaned; that the choir boys no longer dressed in Eton suits; that the old “danger signal” for motors on the Slough Road had been removed—and so on: none of these symptoms failed to confirm in Lord Billericay the gloomy presentiment that “the place was going to the dogs.” I confess that for myself, in spite of the great changes which had swept over it, Eton remained a link with the distant past, and the mellow brickwork of the Warre Schools seemed to breathe out the enchantments of the Middle Age. We went to “Speeches,” of course, and these had a wonderfully old-world atmosphere about them—the knee-breeches and silk stockings of the performers, the immemorial dust of the School Hall, the selections for recitation (including a scene from “You never can tell” and a Maeterlinck piece whose name I have forgotten) all conspired to make you feel as if you were back in the nineteenth century. I think the most modern poem that was recited was Edgar Pirbright’s Hymn to the North Sea, written when the first tide-trap was opened, the one that begins “Now, you damned scrimshanker, get a move on,” and I suppose Edgar Pirbright was dead before Wallace K.S. was born!