I remember, with shame, that I was once so moved by the florid rhetoric of Dean Farrar, in a missionary sermon preached before the University, that I made a contribution to the offertory which I could ill afford. A day or two afterwards, with the return of sanity, I felt the force of the adage that “fools and their money are soon parted,” and I saw that it was worse than folly to send missions to other countries, when we ourselves were little better than pagans at home. The mischief of this spurious religionism was that it lessened the chance of any genuine awakening of conscience to the facts that stared us in the face. We were made to study Paley’s fantastic “Evidences,” while the evidence of nature, of the human heart, and of actual life, was sedulously hidden away. In the Tripos of 1875 the Senior Classic was Mr. Peskett, who belonged properly to the preceding year, but owing to illness or some other cause had “degraded” into ours, and thus robbed my friend Mr. Arthur Tilley of an honour which should rightly have been his. Dr. J. Gow, Headmaster of Westminster School, was third; the fifth place was shared by Mr. Gerald Balfour and myself. It was the custom in those days for headmasters of Eton to draw largely on King’s College for their supply of assistants: thus a King’s Scholar of Eton, after taking his degree at Cambridge, would often return to the school as a Classical assistant master, and so complete the academical round. The process might, perhaps, have been likened to the three stages of butterfly life, but with the first and the last phase transposed. We _began_ as the gay Eton insects, whose ignorance was bliss; and then, after passing through the chrysalis period by the Cam, reappeared on Thames’s bank, metamorphosed into the caterpillars locally known as “beaks,” and usually content thenceforth to crawl soberly along on a wingless but well-nourished career. But even a worm, as we know, will turn; and, as the next chapter must relate, some of the grubs would at times be so unconscionable as to take new and unsettling notions into their heads. IV THE DISCOVERY “Why, they are cannibals!” said Toby. “Granted,” I replied; “but a more gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not exist.”--HERMAN MELVILLE. What are the feelings of the poacher transformed into the gamekeeper? They must, I think, be similar to those of a youth who, after studying for a few years at the University, returns as master to the school which he left as boy. _Quantum mutatus ab illo!_ The scene itself is the same, but the part which he must play in it is now to a great extent reversed; and the irony of the situation is that though henceforth an upholder of law and order, he still, perhaps, sympathizes at heart with the transgressors whom it is his duty to reprimand.