But all the same it was rather a pathetic sight to see a man of about twenty-eight, in the prime of life, sitting down every afternoon and evening, fiddling about with a piece of wood and a box of paints. He derived no pleasure from it: it merely served the purpose of a narcotic. As long as his hands were employed his brain would go to sleep, and he need no longer see the tedious procession of days that lay before him. He was symbolic in a way of the Public School Education that deliberately starves a boy’s intellect for the sake of his body. The type of clean-limbed Britisher, that Public Schools produce, is all very well in its way, and is infinitely preferable to the type produced by any other system, either in England or France. Of that there can be no doubt whatsoever. But the schoolmasters who adopt this line of argument, forget that they are dealing with a material refined upon by the breeding of centuries. The question is not, “Is the material good?” because it is. The question is, “Does Education make the best of this material?” and I am very certain that it does not. Every man should have sufficient part in the intellectual interests of life, to be able to keep his intelligence active for eight months in surroundings that provide no physical outlets. For after all, it is the mind, or, to use Pater’s phrase, “the imaginative reason” that counts. “Thank God that while the nerves decay And muscles desiccate away, The brain’s the hardiest part of men And thrives till threescore years and ten.” And it is surely a severe condemnation of any system that its average products can derive no sustenance from the contemplative side of life, that the moment they are out of the theatres, they have absolutely no resources left. It would have given me the most acute satisfaction to have been able to escort there some of the many schoolmasters who so fiercely defended themselves behind the legend, “By our works ye shall judge us,” which was exactly what I tried to do. The narrow limits of our captivity provided us with only one other craze, the last and the most decadent, for which reason, probably, it was the only one to which I succumbed--Manicure. It was really a tempting lure. One evening I went to the _Kantine_ to buy a pencil, and saw a row of beautiful plush boxes, in which reposed long-handled files, and scissors, and knives; and beside these were bottles of delicate scents and polishes and powders, strangely reminiscent of Amiens. The lure was too great, and forty marks went west.