There was a merciful proviso attached to the last remarkable enactment--namely, that all whose growth of hair had outrun their social status might shave to an extent sufficient to make them presentable, provided that the operation did not take place in public. Consequently many undistinguished but hairy persons were compelled to shave in bed at night after the gas was out. I have often wondered what their mothers would have thought if they had known. Fortunately there is much in our lives that our mothers never hear of. If they did, public schools (among many other things) would cease to exist. Now, Linklater, who, as has been already mentioned, was a precocious youth,--a typical cock-of-the-walk from a preparatory school,--spent his first few weeks at Grandwich in running foul of all the most cherished traditions of that historic foundation. He arrived in a neat bowtie, and proceeded to wear the same, despite the pointed criticisms of a multitude of counsellors, for the space of a week; at the end of which period it was taken from his neck by a self-appointed committee of the Lower Fourth. Finding that his eccentricities were earning him a certain amount of unpopularity, Linklater decided, like the born opportunist that he was, to allay popular feeling by a timely distribution of largesse. He accordingly paid a visit to the school tuck-shop, where he expended two shillings and sixpence on assorted confectionery. On his way back he encountered no less a person than Rumsey, the captain of the Eleven, and, feeling that he might as well conciliate all classes while he was about it, cried, "Catch, there!" and launched the largest sweet he could find in the bag in the direction of Rumsey. The feelings of that potentate on receiving a _marron glacé_ in the middle of his waistcoat from a diminutive fag deprived him for the moment of all power to move or speak, so that the unconscious Linklater, passing on unscathed, lived to tell the tale, and subsequently to hear it told and retold by hysterical _raconteurs_ to delighted audiences for months afterwards. "Heard the latest about that new bloke?" inquired Master Mumford of Pip one evening, under cover of the continuous hum of conversation which always characterised "prep" in the Hivite house. "What new bloke?" "Linklater. Seen him?" Yes, Pip had seen him at nets that day, and had noticed that he was a jolly neat bat. "Notice his boots?" pursued Mumford. "Can't say I did." "Well, they were white!" Master Mumford fairly overflowed with happy laughter at the richness of the jest. The wearing of white buckskin boots was one of the privileges of the First Eleven, and Linklater had run counter to custom and habit again. "Oh," said Pip, "I suppose he didn't know." This childishly lenient view of the case did not appeal to Mumford, who, with all the small-minded man's respect for the letter of the law, was thirsting to punish the evildoer.