Already, darkly in the glass of fiction and under the title of David Blaize, I have hinted at some of the habits of the young gentlemen who led a life, alternately uproarious and terror-stricken, in the other part of the house, but now more personal details can be indulged in. By far the most salient feature in the school, even as the sun is the most salient feature in the day, making it precisely what it is, was Mr. Waterfield himself. He seems now to me to have been nine feet high, and he certainly walked with a curious rocking motion, which was convenient, because if you were where you should not be, you could detect his coming long before he could detect anybody. He had a square grey beard which smelt of cigars, a fact known from his practice, when he had frightened the life out of you by terrible harangues, of saying, “Well, that’s all over, my boy,” and kissing you. I believe him to have been about the best private schoolmaster who ever lived, for he ruled by love and fear combined in a manner that while it inspired small boys with hellish terror, yet rewarded them with the sweet fruits of hero-worship. He exacted blind obedience, under peril of really infamous torture with a thick ruler with which he savagely caned offending hands, but he managed at the same time to make us appreciate his approbation. The ruler was kept in a convenient drawer of the knee-hole table in his study, and was a perfectly brutal instrument, but the approach of the ruler, like a depression over the Atlantic, was always heralded by storm-cones. The first of these was the taking of the keys from his trousers-pocket, and then you had time to pull yourself together to retract an equivocation, to confess a fault, or try to remember something you had been repeatedly told. The second storm-cone was the insertion of the key into the drawer where the ruler was kept. You had to be of very strong nerve when that second storm-cone was hoisted, and divert your mind from the possible future to the supine which you could not recollect, for when the key was once inserted there might any moment be a sudden startling explosion of wrath, and out flew the ruler. Then came a short agonizing scene, and the blubbering victim after six smart blows had the handle of the door turned for him by somebody else, because his hands were useless through pain. The ruler was quite rare, and probably well deserved; anyhow it was the counter-balance to the hero-worship born of Mr. Waterfield’s approval. For more heinous offences there was birching, but that had certain compensations, for afterwards you took down your breeches and showed the injured parts to admiring companions. But there was nothing to show, as Mrs. Pullet said about the boluses, when you were caned. Besides you could play cricket quite easily, shortly after a whipping, but no human hand could hold a bat shortly after the application of the ruler.