answered Hawtrey, pointing majestically to the block with his long rod. He was so pleased with his neat paraphrase of Horace that the metrically injured boy got off very cheap. One night three boys, Gerry Goodlake, who afterwards won the V.C. at the battle of the Alma, Suttie and another whose name I have forgotten, got out of their tutor’s (Elliot’s) house, disguised as navvies, went up town and procured a liberal supply of the materials necessary for the brewing of a bowl of rum punch, with which they managed, as they hoped unseen, to get back into their rooms. Unfortunately for them old Bott, the good old Waterloo man who was the College policeman, had marked them down, and at the moment when the brew was steaming fragrance in walked the tutor. The result was, of course, an execution, the anticipation of which aroused such a fever in the school that many boys committed small crimes in the hope of having a fine view of the tragedy at the expense of the traditional four cuts of the birch. Hawtrey was bewildered by the number of “bills” that kept coming in; but he knew his boys and he smelt a rat, so he decided to hold the great execution _à huis clos_, divided the remaining “complaints” into two halves—kept one half himself to be dealt with at future “after schools,” and sent the other half down to Dickie Okes[19] to be attended to in lower school. Great was the disappointment of the bloodthirsty little villains at the Doctor’s cleverness. In Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte’s otherwise admirable “History of Eton College” there is one great blemish in the very niggardly praise, or perhaps it would be more truthful to say the very liberal dispraise, which is attached to Hawtrey’s scholarship. We are continually being told that it was inaccurate. In one very unjust passage it is contended in addition “that he was not thoroughly well-informed, though he spent thirty thousand pounds on books;” that “he could not estimate correctly the intellectual development of younger men, though he corresponded with the leaders of England and France;” that “he was not qualified to train schoolboys, like Vaughan and Kennedy,” etc., etc., etc.