II. Probation-Day still continued in my time to be an important event--a sort of red-letter day in our calendar. The hour for assembling was eight o'clock, instead of nine; it had been half-past six while the school was exclusively composed of residents within a limited radius; but the enlarged time was a sore trial in the winter where one had to travel from a suburb, as I did from Old Brompton. They supplied breakfast at the place, not gratuitously, but at a fixed tariff. It would not have been much for a wealthy Company to provide an entertainment once or twice a year for two or three hundred lads at a shilling or so a head; but the Merchant Taylors, I think, have always been notorious for parsimony. Very little was accomplished before the meal, and after its completion we had to set to work, the old room upstairs being as ill-adapted for the purpose of an examination as can well be imagined, the boys having to use the forms as desks and to kneel in front of them. We were a very short distance from the Middle Ages. Matters were not much changed since the time of the original establishment of the charity. Indeed, it appears from Dugard's _School's Probation_, 1652, that in the seventeenth century the Company paid for some kind of collation:-- "There shall be paid unto the Master of the School, for beer, ale, and new manchet-bread, with a dish of sweet butter, which hee shall have ready in the morning, with two fine glasses set upon the Table, and covered with two fair napkins, and two fine trenchers, with a knife laid upon each trencher, to the end that such as please may take part, to staie their stomachs until the end of the examination ... ijs." The number of boys was in 1652 comparatively limited; but of course without a revival of the ancient miracle two shillings' worth of victuals would not have gone far in allaying the hunger of a far smaller gathering, and this allowance must have simply been for such as had missed their meal at home, or desired additional refreshment. The old examination itself presents numerous points of curiosity, as we look at it through the present medium. Considerable stress seems to have been laid on dictation. The master opened, on the sudden, Cicero, the Greek Testament, Æsop's _Fables_ in Greek, and read a passage, which the boys of a particular form had to take down, and then turn into some other language, or into verse, or make verses upon it--a pretty piece of trifling, much like the nonsense-verses which we used to have to compose in my day, and as profitable. Some of the English sentences to be turned into Latin are odd enough: "Bacchus and Apollo send for Homer;" "I went to Colchester to eat oysters;" "My Uncle went to Oxford to buie gloves;" "The Atheist went to Amsterdam to chuse his religion." Others might have been autobiographical: "Marie was my sister, she dwelt at London;" "Elisabeth was my Aunt, she dwelt at York;" "Anna was my Grandmother, she dwelt at Worcester."