It is at a Preparatory School that boys learn manners, courtesy, the proper behaviour in the presence of ladies. But these things, you may say, a boy will learn at home. No doubt he ought to, but any preparatory schoolmaster will disabuse you on that point. How many small boys of seven who have not been to a school will, when they are handed a plate of cakes, take the one nearest to them rather than the one of which they fancy the appearance. How many small boys will think of opening a door for a lady, of offering her his chair when she enters the room, of apologising to his hostess if he arrives late for breakfast. These are the little things that a boy learns at a Preparatory School and that he will learn nowhere else; at all good schools a great value is placed on these points of etiquette; if anything, 'good manners' are rather overdone, and the precipitate charge of twelve or thirteen urchins towards a door handle is likely to prove embarrassing to the lady visitor who has risen from her chair. At my own school, for instance, music lessons always took place immediately after lunch; so that, if lunch was a little late, the first boys were allowed to leave the table before grace. It was a rule, however, that no boy should ever leave the dining-room till he had asked the permission of the ladies. And many visitors were much perplexed by the repeated inaudible apologies of nervous small boys who came stumbling towards them between two close-packed tables. The good manners of a preparatory school boy are indeed slightly pedagogic. Their elbows are pressed into their sides when they eat, their wrists are raised above the table, and, in a precise voice, they request permission to trouble their next door neighbour for the salt. They are like the critics who insist that a sonnet is not a sonnet if the last lines of the sestet form a couplet. But it is a fault on the right side. For manners, as well as morals, relax in the greater freedom of a Public School, and at the age of fifteen one has managed to substitute ease for stiffness.