The consulate of Dr. Hawtrey was a time of transition at Eton as elsewhere. The Eton to which I was sent in 1846 differed in little from that which my father had known some thirty years earlier. With the exception of the new College buildings, only just finished, in Weston’s Yard, the outer aspect of the place had undergone no change. There were the same old tumbledown, crazy tenements with weather-stained walls and patched roofs, occupied by tutors and dames. All the sanitary arrangements—save the word!—were primitively disgusting. Baths were unknown. During the summer months, by the grace of Father Thames, there was bathing in Cuckoo Weir, at Upper Hope, and at Athens, but from September till about May foot-tubs of hot water carried to the various rooms on a Saturday night represented all the cleanliness that was deemed necessary. The Reform Act and new forces, born of railways and machinery, and what were by many derided as new-fangled fads of hygiene were compelling and irresistible. During the last two years of my schoolboyhood the cold tub had become an institution of every morning. Many other improvements were in progress and have long since been carried out. The head master’s house, if an anachronism, was eminently fitted to its venerable and book-loving tenant. It still stands, a picturesque building of which the red bricks and tiles have grown hoary with age, long, low and rambling, flush with the Slough Road on one side, separated on the other from Weston’s Yard by a narrow strip of garden. It was so shallow that, like Hampton Court, Berkeley Castle, and many old-fashioned buildings, it consisted only of a succession of rooms leading into one another. On the first floor a very meagre passage had been negotiated, so as to give some privacy to bedrooms, but on the ground floor there was nothing but a chain of rooms. From floor to ceiling every room was lined with bookcases criss-crossed with thick brass wires, in which the treasures which were the accumulation of a lifetime were amassed. Even the bedrooms were fitted in the same way. It was one huge library. I do not remember any works of art or ornaments with the exception of one of Wedgwood’s copies of the Portland Vase. When Provost Hodgson died on the 29th of December, 1852, Dr. Hawtrey succeeded him. The drop in income was considerable, and he had been too large a giver to have saved anything. A great portion of the library had to be sold, and it went for what even at that time was a song. What would it have been worth now? Before changing over into the Provost’s lodge, Dr. Hawtrey sent for me and gave me, as a keepsake in memory of many happy days spent with him among his books, a beautiful little Elzevir Livy. To my father, his old pupil, he gave a grand copy of Tasso.