Their stories of school days—chiefly blood-curdling tales of scrapes and punishments borne with Spartan fortitude or avoided by hair’s-breadth escapes, the chief joys of scholastic memory—had sunk deeply into my mind, so that Eton seemed very familiar; and yet when I faced its reality, the _religio loci_ was a revelation. I remember the mixed feeling—a great joy, a shrinking fear—before the plunge into the great unknown; the sorrow of leaving home, the freedom of new wings, the exultation of life. I remember the terror lest I should be guilty of some solecism upon which the wrath of the gods of the sixth form should fall; I remember a heart throbbing, as men’s hearts might throb before a battle, when my father rang at Mr. John Hawtrey’s[17] door (for I was to start in lower school) and my relief at the sight of his and Mrs. Hawtrey’s kind faces, and of the comfortable matron, Mrs. Paramour, ample of bosom and sympathy, to whose care I was commended! Then the awe of being led through the gate into the school-yard with the statue of the King-Founder and the entrance to the cloisters under Lupton’s tower, from the ground-floor room on the right of which there issued the weird and muffled noises of a not unmelodious flute—sounds that were to become very familiar to me later on, for the room was occupied as a schoolroom by dear old Herr Schönerstedt, professor of Hebrew and German, who, like Tityrus and Frederic the Great, used to solace his leisure hours, which were many, with a flute. Thence into the playing fields, in which the elms planted in Charles the First’s time, then at the zenith of their pride, now all dead and gone, were just putting forth their summer plumage; Fellows’ Pond, with a lazy pike or two basking on the surface; Poet’s Walk, Sixth Form Bench, and above all, the glory of Windsor Castle, most regal of palaces, towering above the Thames. How beautiful it all was, and how romantic! The fairies must have been tripping in rings on the turf, the dryads tempted out of their barken hiding-places, the water-nymphs making high festival on the silver flood, so radiantly joyous was the day! * * * * * We lingered under the one oak tree standing in lonely majesty on the river bank, trying in vain to dip its boughs into the ripples on which the sunbeams were dancing; we looked at Lord Wellesley’s weeping willows (I wonder whether the planting of them by the great Duke’s brother might have had some dim connection with St. Helena). It was delightful wandering through those Elysian fields in which every tree, every corner was a peg upon which our elders could hang a story of thirty years ago—the fields that the Duke of Wellington loved to the end of his days. We were to go to luncheon with the Head Master, my father’s old tutor and lifelong friend. He used often to come and see us in the holidays, and so was perhaps not quite such a figure of awe to me as he was to most new boys.