Certainly many unlikely people reach the high-backed chair of the Sixth Form table. And a house master must often wonder how will taste the strange stew that is simmering--a compound of so many unknown ingredients. In spite of experience, he is always guessing. But the changes are less considerable than might be expected, or it would be truer to say, perhaps, that the changes follow a more or less ordinary course. A boy's attitude on reaching office is ordered by what he has read and by example. The ragster usually becomes a martinet. He has read of the reformation of Prince Hal; the epigram about Kildare ruling all Ireland is the one piece of Elizabethan history that his memory has retained. How nice he feels it will be to surprise every one. What a shock it will be to his old companions. Every one must have said of him: 'Oh, Park'll be all right. He's such a ragster himself, he's sure to go pretty easy!' In his first week, therefore, he canes a quite senior boy for playing the piano too loudly in the changing room. He becomes in a short while extremely unpopular and a general terror. If on the start of the school year one were asked to tell which of the new prefects one would be best advised to avoid, one would almost certainly place one's finger on the boy who had been most frequently in trouble during the previous term. There is no sign, however, by which we can detect the officious type of prefect who speaks solemnly of his responsibilities and makes life extremely unpleasant for his house and for his old companions. It is impossible to tell on whom this germ is going to settle. It need not be the reformed rake: perhaps because rakes reform so seldom. It is not necessarily the religious boy, or the intellectual boy. But on some one that germ is sure to settle, and it is of all the germs the most annoying. There is nothing more exasperating than the officious prefect. On the third evening of the term he walks into the study of a former associate, looks confoundedly uncomfortable, seats himself on the table, and then, after a moment's embarrassed silence, permits his features to assume an expression of austere dignity, and says:-- 'Jones, you confided in me two terms ago a little secret, you'll remember what it was. Well, I feel that it is my unpleasant duty, now that I am a prefect, to report this matter to the head of the house. He will take what action he thinks fit.' Jones sits back in his chair, a look of horrified disgust upon his face. 'But, my dear fellow,' he says, 'you couldn't possibly--I mean I told you that in confidence. You couldn't be such a sneak!' The prefect would shake his head. 'You do not understand. It is not sneaking. You would not call it sneaking on the part of a policeman if he arrested an old friend whom he found breaking into a house. This is an official duty that has nothing to do with our personal relationship.'