Mr. Woodman, in a voice of deepest melancholy, foretold all this on the first night. When he learned that John was new to his profession he smiled at him like a butcher on a good sheep delivered for slaughter. "Whatever made you do it?" he asked. "Do anything, be a scavenger, a policeman--you will at least retain your self respect. You will not have to endure the chilliness of schoolmasters' wives, the scorn of parents, the buffoonery of boys. We are fools out of motley, something masquerading as gentlemen on the stipend of stevedores. My God, Dean, pack your trunk and flee to-night. This is the end of all things. Have you dreams, ambitions, hope, courage, youth? Abandon all who enter this profession!" John remonstrated. There was the great opportunity of forming character, surely it was a noble thing to teach the young, to gain the confidence, if not the affection of boys, to watch them grow in intelligence, to trace the operations of their fresh minds slowly opening on a wonderful world? Mr. Woodman listened patiently to John's panegyric, and peered at him over the top of the gold-rimmed spectacles he wore when correcting exercise books in the jumping incandescent light. "Dear me! This is almost pathetic! Your innocence moves me. I hope you will pardon my saying you must be very young. Eighteen? Ah! that is a blessed age, but you have yet to learn what boys are. Let me warn you and save you much pain. They are devils incarnate. And don't cherish any illusion about being a schoolmaster. We are a race of pariahs. At forty we have no feelings left; we are desiccated text books. At fifty we are old fools haunting the doorsteps of the scholastic agents or short-sightedly sitting on the prepared pins of our loving pupils. Don't think you will receive any gratitude for your labour; you won't. Your cheque at the end of term wipes out all obligations. After three years' close attention, they are not even your boys. They pass on to a public school and repudiate you. Boys are sent to preparatory schools by lazy parents who wish to get rid of the responsibility of their offspring, or by upstarts who want to start the new generation in the grooves of social respectability. They will hold you in utter contempt because you cannot do anything better than bring up their children for them. Epictetus was a prince in comparison with the modern schoolmaster!"