It is only a deviation from those ordinary rules of school life, which one observes naturally and without thinking, that enables one to realize how strong public-school prejudices really are. At a school, for instance, where the regulations say that coats only of black or dark blue are to be worn, a boy who appears one day in even the most respectable and unostentatious brown finds himself looked on with a mixture of awe and repulsion, which would be excessive if he had sandbagged the headmaster. So in the case of shoes. School rules decree that a boy shall go to his form room in shoes. There is no real reason why, if the day is fine, he should not wear gym shoes, should he prefer them. But, if he does, the thing creates a perfect sensation. Boys say, "Great Scott, what _have_ you got on?" Masters say, "Jones, _what_ are you wearing on your feet?" In the few minutes which elapse between the assembling of the form for call-over and the arrival of the form master, some wag is sure either to stamp on the gym shoes, accompanying the act with some satirical remark, or else to pull one of them off, and inaugurate an impromptu game of football with it. There was once a boy who went to school one morning in elastic-sided boots. Mike had always been coldly distant in his relations to the rest of his form, looking on them, with a few exceptions, as worms; and the form, since his innings against Downing's on the Friday, had regarded Mike with respect. So that he escaped the ragging he would have had to undergo at Wrykyn in similar circumstance. It was only Mr. Downing who gave trouble. There is a sort of instinct which enables some masters to tell when a boy in their form is wearing gym shoes instead of the more formal kind, just as people who dislike cats always know when one is in a room with them. They cannot see it but they feel it in their bones. Mr. Downing was perhaps the most bigoted anti-gym-shoeist in the whole list of English schoolmasters. He waged war remorselessly against gym shoes. Satire, abuse, lines, detention--every weapon was employed by him in dealing with their wearers. It had been the late Dunster's practice always to go over to school in gym shoes when, as he usually did, he felt shaky in the morning's lesson. Mr. Downing always detected him in the first five minutes, and that meant a lecture of anything from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour on Untidy Habits and Boys Who Looked Like Loafers--which broke the back of the morning's work nicely. On one occasion, when a particularly tricky bit of Livy was on the bill of fare, Dunster had entered the form room in heelless Turkish bath slippers, of a vivid crimson; and the subsequent proceedings, including his journey over to the house to change the heelless atrocities, had seen him through very nearly to the quarter-to-eleven interval. Mike, accordingly, had not been in his place for three minutes when Mr. Downing, stiffening like a pointer, called his name.