My father took me in person to Marlborough. I did not much relish that, since I thought, with private school ideas still hanging about me, that it would be a handicap to be known as the son of a man who wore black cloth gaiters, an apron, and a hat with strings at the side. That was all very well in Cornwall, where he was bishop, but here I should have preferred a parent who looked like other parents. He seemed to have no consciousness of being unusually dressed himself, and one incident in the few hours he stayed much impressed itself on me, for he came with me into some class-room or other where a lot of boys were sitting, talking and whistling, with their caps on. My father took off his hat when he entered (which again I thought showed a slight want of knowledge), and then, to my surprise, every boy in the place did the same. The whistling ceased, nobody laughed, and I went out again rather proud of him. He seemed to have done the right thing.... Outside the College buildings there were two or three small boarding-houses and three large ones containing forty to fifty boys each, into one of which I should have gone if I had got the famous “House Scholarship.” As it was, I was put into B House, a square brick building of three stories, each of which constituted an in-college house. The edifice itself was like a penitentiary: a big open space from the skylight to the basement occupied the centre of it, with two class-rooms and a boot-room in the basement. Round this open space ran three floors of stone passages, connected by stone stairs; these passages were lit by arches opening on to the central space, and defended from it by tall iron bars; and out of these three tiers of passages opened four dormitories on each floor, a class-room, one bathroom with three baths, a sitting and bedroom belonging to the house-master of each house, with corresponding accommodation for a second house-master at the opposite corner, and a study next to the bathroom for the head of the house. Ten to fifteen boys slept in each of these dormitories, which were lit by day from three or four small windows, and for purposes of going to bed and getting up in the dark from one small gas-jet. Down the centre of each dormitory stood a board punctuated with basins, one for each boy, and furnished with a corresponding number of crockery mugs to hold water for tooth-washing. A narrow shelf ran round the room above the beds, where brushes and combs were kept. There was a chest of drawers underneath the gas-jet belonging to the prefect of the dormitory, and he had a chair by his bedside where he could put his clothes. As half the beds were directly below the windows, the occupants naturally objected to having their immediate windows open during inclemencies, so on cold or rainy nights they were all shut. There were no partitions between the beds; all operations were conducted in wholesome publicity, and there was no objection to anybody saying his prayers.