for the day, standing on the breakfast-table. The proclamation began with “O-Yes!” three times repeated, and ended with “God save the Queen, and down with the Radicals!” Anyone was at liberty to throw bread, sugar, or boots at the crier during his announcement; and many of my schoolfellows have since displayed extraordinary eloquence on public platforms and in the pulpit. In politics our instruction was entirely practical. For centuries the school had been divided into bitterly hostile camps--day-boys and boarders--doing the same work, sitting side by side in form, but never speaking to each other or walking together, or playing the same games. No feud of Whig and Tory, or Boer and Briton, was so implacable as ours. “Skytes” we called them, those hated day-boys, for whom the school was founded--mere Scythians, uncouth and brutish things that sacrificed the flesh of men and drank from a human skull. Out of school hours we did not suffer them within school gates. They were excluded even from the ball-court, except for fights. They were compelled to pay for separate football and cricket fields; and in football they adopted the vulgar rules of Association, while we aristocrats of tradition continued to cherish an almost incomprehensible game, in which, as in a Homeric battle, the leaders did the fighting, while the indistinguishable host trampled to and fro in patient pursuit of a ball which they rarely touched, but sometimes saw. The breach may have begun when Elizabeth was Queen, or in the days of Cavaliers and Roundheads, and there is no knowing how long it would have lasted but for the wisdom of that wise master already mentioned. Whilst I was still there, myself a red-hot boarder, he began delicately to reason, amid the choking indignation of both sides, whose rancor increased as reason shook it. No reformer ever set himself to a task so hopeless, and yet it was accomplished. Within a year we were playing football under Association rules together, and before the old school was removed the wrath of ages was appeased.