Boys will be boys the world over, and I never yet saw a boy whose mouth was not open like a young bird’s, ready for something to eat. We were allowed only once a week to make purchases, and the mittai and boxwalas knew the day as well as we did, and never failed to come, and though it was not down in the rules that we should see them we always met them and on time. Many were the talks we had about what we should purchase next time. It soon became known that I was a liberal buyer, and I am proud to say that I was also a liberal giver. This made me many a friend and warded off many a bad cut that I might otherwise have received. There was nothing great in this, no real true feeling or friendship. It proves nothing but this, that boys as well as men know on which side their bread is buttered. How frequently we see men, brainless idiots, without a virtue or grace to recommend them, fawned upon by men of intelligence, of honor or without honor, for the sole and only reason that they have money. Let there be a carcass, though tainted, the vultures will surround it. My instinct was not so dull but that I saw through this personal attachment of some of the boys, not all of them, I am glad to state, for quite a number of them whose pockets were rather pinched, liked me not only for my sweets, but for my own sake. I know this, for years after, when I met them, they would say with a warm grasp of the hand and a kindliness of voice. “Japhet you were kind to me at school.” Such expressions are worth more than Government Stocks and far better than lying, empty inscriptions on a tombstone after one is dead. But there were ripples now and then. Soon after the term opened the new boys began to make up the different teams, clubs and societies. There was one team rather high, inclusive of the larger boys of what they considered the “first class” and exclusive of any that did not quite come up to the views of their set. In short, they were aristocratic, and I could never understand on what this was based. In looks they were inferior to others; their manners were rude and coarse; in their studies they were below the average, and some of them did not pass their “exams;” yet they presumed to be _the_ set of the whole school. It is not only in school that we see this assumption of superiority, for in life similar scenes are enacted. I have often been amused by the strutting and parading of men who are in society. I knew one, the son of a London tailor in the civil service, who would have taken oath that he had never seen a goose; another, the son of an engine driver, who I know would have sworn that he really did not know what an engine was, but then he was so ignorant that he would not have known his own father, the engine driver, had he met him in “society.” And of the aristocracy itself, it might not be safe for many of them to look up their pedigrees, for fear of running against a pirate, a ruffian, or a scamp of some kind.