Boys in the fifth form at Fernhall shared a study with one companion. Monitors of course lived in solitary splendour, with a bed which would stand on its head, and allowed itself to be shut up in a cupboard in the corner. Small boys who had not attained even to the fringe of the school aristocracy lived in herds in bare and exceedingly untidy rooms round the inner quads. Even in those days there were monitors who were worshippers of art. Some of them had curtains in their rooms of rich and varied colouring; one of them had a plate hung up which he declared was a piece of undoubted old Worcester. Tomlinson was a great authority on objects of _virtù_, and a rare connoisseur, but we changed his plate for one which we bought for sixpence at Newby's, and he never knew the difference. Then there was one fellow who had several original oil paintings. These represented farmyard scenes and were attributed indifferently to Landseer, Herring, and a number of other celebrated artists. Whoever painted them, these pictures were the objects of more desperate forays than any other property within the school limits. I remember them well as adorning the room of a certain man of muscle, to whom, of course, they belonged merely as the spoils of war. The rightful owner lived three doors off, but I don't think that he ever had the pluck to attempt to regain his own. However, in the small boys' rooms there were none of these luxuries of an effete civilisation. There was a book-shelf full of ragged books, none of which by any chance ever bore the name of anyone in that study; there was a table, a gas-burner, a frying-pan, and a kettle. These last-named articles might have been seen in every study at Fernhall, from the study of the monitor to that of the pauper, as we called that unfortunate being who had not yet emerged from the lower school. In the long nights of winter, when the wild sea roared just beyond the limits of their quad, and the spray came flying over the sea-wall to be dashed against their study windows, all Fernhall boys had a common consolation. They called it brewing: not the brewing of beer or of any intoxicating liquor, but of that cheering cup of tea which consoles so many thousands, from the London charwoman to the pig-tailed Chinaman, from the enervated Indian to the half-frozen Russian exile in Siberia. At first the headmasters of Fernhall tried hard to put down this practice. Sergeants lurked about our passages, confiscated our kettles, carried away the frying-pans full of curly rashers from under our longing eyes, and 'lines' and flagellations were all we got in exchange. At last a new era began. A great reformer arrived, a 'Head' of liberal leanings and wide sympathy. This man frowned on coercion, and, instead of taking away our kettles, gave us a huge range of stoves on which to boil them. From a cook's point of view, no doubt, the range of stoves was a great improvement on the old gas-burner, but, in spite