The school was carried on very much on the old plan of teaching chiefly classics, but teaching them thoroughly. Modern languages, mathematics, and physical science had a poor chance, though they clamoured for recognition. Latin and Greek verse were considered far more important. In the two highest forms we had to speak Latin, and such as it was it seemed to us much easier than to speak French. Hebrew was also taught as an optional subject during the last four years, and the little I know of Hebrew dates chiefly from my school-days. Schoolboys soon find out what their masters think of the value of the different subjects taught at school, and they are apt to treat not only the subjects themselves but the teachers also according to that standard. Hence our modern language and our physical science masters had a hard time of it. They could not keep their classes in order, and it was by no means unusual for many of the boys simply to stay away from their lessons. The old mathematical master, before beginning his lesson, used to rub his spectacles, and after looking round the half empty classroom, mutter in a plaintive voice: “I see again many boys who are not here to-day.” When the same old master began to lecture on physical science, he told the boys to bring a frog to be placed under a glass from which the air had been extracted by an air-pump. Of course every one of the twenty or thirty boys brought two or three frogs, and when the experiment was to be made all these frogs were hopping about the lecture-room, and the whole army of boys were hopping after them over chairs and tables to catch them. No wonder that during this tumult the master did not succeed with his experiment, and when at last the glass bowl was lifted up and we were asked to see the frog, great was the joy of all the boys when the frog hopped out and escaped from the hands of its executioner. Such was the wrath excited by these new-fangled lectures among the boys that they actually committed the vandalism of using one of the forms as a battering-ram against the enclosure in which the physical science apparatus was kept, and destroyed some of the precious instruments supplied by Government. Severe punishments followed, but they did not serve to make physical science more popular.