Most of us make Tom Brown's acquaintance in early youth. We fortify ourselves with a course of him before going to school for the first time--at the age of twelve or thereabouts--and we quickly realise, even at that tender age, that there were giants in those days. Have you ever considered Tom Brown's first day at school? No? Then observe. He was called at half-past two in the morning, at the Peacock Inn, Islington, and by three o'clock was off as an "outside" upon the Tally-Ho Coach, in the small hours of a November morning, on an eighty-mile drive to Rugby. [Illustration: THE FAG: "SIC VOS NON VOBIS"] He arrived at his destination just in time to take dinner in Hall, chaperoned by his new friend East; and then, _duce_ Old Brooke, plunged into that historic football match between the Schoolhouse and the School--sixty on one side and two hundred on the other. Modern gladiators who consider "two thirty-fives" a pretty stiff period of play will be interested to note that this battle raged for three hours, and that the Schoolhouse were filled with surprise and rapture at achieving a goal after only sixty minutes' play. ("A goal in an hour! Such a thing had not been done in a Schoolhouse match these five years.") In the course of the game Tom was knocked over while stopping a rush, and as the result of spending some minutes at the bottom of a heap of humanity composed of a goodly proportion of his two hundred opponents, was finally hauled out "a motionless body." However, he recovered sufficiently to be able to entertain East to tea and sausages in the Lower Fifth School. After a brief interval for ablution came supper, followed by a free-and-easy musical entertainment in the Schoolhouse hall, which included singing, a good deal of indiscriminate beer-drinking, and the famous speech of Old Brooke. Tom, it is hardly necessary to say, obliged with a song--"with much applause." Then came prayers, and Tom's first glimpse of the mighty Arnold. (We may note here that a new boy of the old days was not apparently troubled by tiresome regulations upon the subject of reporting himself to his housemaster on arrival.) Even then Tom's first day from home was not over, for before retiring to his slumber he was tossed in a blanket three times. Not a bad record for a boy of twelve! And yet we flatter ourselves that we live a strenuous life.