Mathematics were held in scarcely less contempt than French. We had two wranglers to teach us, but they never taught anyone. Their appearance in form was hailed with indecent joy. As one of the classical masters said, it was like the “Cease fire” on a field-day, and the whole body of boys abandoned themselves at once to relaxation. In the lower forms far-sailing darts were seen floating through the air as at a spiritualist seance; in the upper we discussed the steeple-chase or did Greek verses. A boy who really knew any mathematics was regarded by ourselves and the masters as a kind of freak. There was no dealing with him. His mathematical marks got him into forms beyond his real knowledge--his knowledge of Greek. He upset the natural order of things. He was a perpetual ugly duckling, that could not emit iambics. So his lot was far from enviable, and happily I remember only two such cases. In the sixth, it was Saturday mornings which were given to this innocent pursuit of mathematics, and to it we owed our happiest hours of peace. To go up School Gardens on a bright summer day, to cross the leisurely street of the beautiful country town, to buy breakfast (for an ancient tradition kept us strenuously underfed), to devour it slowly and at ease, knowing there was only mathematics before us that morning, to be followed by the long afternoon and Sunday--that was a secure and unequalled joy, and whenever mathematics are mentioned, I still feel a throb of gratitude for those old pleasures. Our one lesson on Sunday was a difficulty to the masters. Of course there was the Greek testament to fall back upon, but its Greek was so easy and so inferior to ours that it became a positive danger. We were sometimes given a Latin catechism, by some Protestant Father of the sixteenth century, denouncing Transubstantiation, but that also we had to read with caution lest it should influence our Latin prose. Once we waded through Dr. Westcott’s _Gospel of the Resurrection_, a supposed concession to those of us who were going to Oxford. On Sunday evenings we learnt cantos of the _In Memoriam_ by heart, and explained them next morning by suggesting how they might be turned into Greek or Latin lyrics. Then the real labor of life began again with Greek, and so the weeks rolled on without a change. Once, it is true, our greatest master got an afternoon hour for the teaching of wisdom to the sixth, and we really tried to listen, for he stood six foot four and had been captain of football at Oxford. But it was no good. Wisdom was far too easy and unimportant for us, and we let her voice cry in vain. Of such diversions as physical science or mechanics we never even heard, though their absence was perhaps sufficiently compensated for by the system of fagging, under which all the lower forms learnt the arts of lighting fires and plain cooking for the upper sixth. The new-boys were also practiced in public oratory, having in turn to proclaim the athletic announcements