The discretion of boys is extraordinary: their fear of giving anything away; their constant profession of happiness, in spite of obvious misery. But then, of course, it must be remembered that they accept the conditions of school life as the best that life has to offer. They think that _is_ happiness. * * * * * In the evening after dinner some of the “boys” played poker. Gradually I made their acquaintance. One of them told me of the life in Buenos Ayres. He asked me to lend him a book. He had a pal who read books, and was in fact reading, he said, a book which he believed to be the _best book in print_. That was a nice phrase, and I have already quoted it. He fetched the book: it turned out to be “Monte Cristo.” I agree as to the description of it. In another book on English prisons I have read just lately, called “A Holiday in Gaol,” the writer says that “Monte Cristo” was engaged half a dozen deep by the prisoners at Wormwood Scrubbs. The “boy” turned over the leaves of “Monte Cristo” and came across the name “Sinbad the Sailor,” and asked me whether it was the same story as “Sinbad the Sailor,” because he had seen that played at Sydney, and couldn’t make it out. It is, indeed, not very easy to make out the story of “Sinbad the Sailor” from a pantomime version. I saw this actual version of “Sinbad the Sailor” later in Wellington, and a very good pantomime it was; but lucidity and cohesion of plot were not its strongest points. In Sydney pantomimes go on all the year round, I am told, and not only at Christmas time, as in England. I was playing patience after dinner. This led to talking of fortune-telling by cards, and one of the Sydney “boys” asked me to tell his fortune, which I did, as well as that of five or six others. The next day one of them informed me that I had told their fortunes “to a tick.” Let me hastily say that I don’t believe there is anything in it; but cards are uncanny things all the same, and fruitful in odd coincidences. Once when I was travelling in Russia I met a man who professed to tell fortunes by cards. It was in a third-class railway carriage and the man was a poor man. This is how he did it. He told one to wish, and then dealt out his cards in the orthodox manner; but he added, “When you wish, you mustn’t think of a green horse or else your wish won’t come true.” As if after being told such a thing one could help thinking of a green horse. * * * * * I am reading a book by that delightful author, William de Morgan, called “Somehow Good.” He is one of those authors who does the work for you. The book reads itself: just in the same way as Italian servants say that crockery breaks. For instance, an Italian servant never says, “The cook has broken a plate,” but “A plate has broken itself to the cook.” (Si e rotto un piatto alla cuoca.)