Gradually, too, I fell in with a group of boys that belonged to the gentler families of Queenshaven. I shall have more to say of them later, for these classmates passed together through school and college with me and so lived on terms of daily intimacy with me for eight years. Through their companionship, at all events, I soon felt at home in the school, an equal among equals in play and study. I have said that our teachers were men. Real men, I hasten to add, not the spiritual starvelings who are content nowadays with the wage-slavery of the High School. The salaries of these Queenshaven teachers were rather better than such salaries are today and the purchasing power of money was of course far greater. The principal was the only man I have ever known who truly embodied the peculiar ideal of the Christian gentleman. He had both sweetness and strength, profound piety and wide charity. I can still see the beautiful benevolence in his searching blue eyes and hear his clear, bell-like voice. I do not know whether he consciously thought of the methods of Arnold of Rugby; it is certain that he practiced them. The better natured of my schoolmates and I never resented his punishments; we knew he was incapable of inflicting them until in his kind and manly judgment forgiveness would have been morally harmful to the offender. His influence and example drew me back to the Methodist church.... It is a sad reflection that this good man’s end was pitiful. A trusted brother in the church absconded with all our principal’s modest savings. They were small enough, for he was liberal in his charities beyond the bounds of discretion. But this blow both in its moral and in its physical aspect overwhelmed him. He fell into a state of melancholia and I remembered him, in later years, a mild, vague-eyed, broken figure on the Queenshaven streets.