His house had the reputation of being the most comfortable of all the boarding houses--a fact due to the unstinting liberality, careful supervision, and motherly kindness of “Mother Mark,” an excellent and admirable old lady, than whom it would be impossible to conceive any one more fitted for the position she occupied. The unstinting liberality, it is fair to say, characterised all the Drury houses; and probably the others also. But for truly motherly care there was but one “Mother Mark.” “Old Mark” was exceedingly popular, as indeed he deserved to be, for a more kindly-natured man never existed. He had an old-fashioned belief in the virtues of the rod; and though his bodily infirmity combined with his good nature to make him sparing in the application of it, a flogging was at his hands sufficiently disagreeable to make one desirous of avoiding it. “Your clock,” he would say, “requires to be wound up every Monday morning,” meaning that a Monday morning flogging was a good beginning of the week. But the rods were kept in a cupboard in the study--how well I remember the Bluebeard-closet sort of reputation which surrounded it!--and the cupboard was always kept locked. And very often it happened that somehow or other the key was in the keeping of Mrs. Drury. Then a message would be sent to Mrs. Drury for the key, and very probably the proposed patient was the messenger, in which case--and it is strange that the recurrence of the fact did not suggest suspicion to old Mark--it almost invariably happened that Mrs. Drury was very sorry, but she could not find the key anywhere! There never surely was a key so frequently mislaid as the key of that terrible cupboard! Well, it was arranged that I was to go every day to Mark Drury’s study, not, as I have said, as a regular member of the school, but to get such tuition as might be picked up from the _genius loci_, and from such personal teaching as the old man could bestow on me at moments unoccupied by his own pupils. And this arrangement, it must be understood, was entirely a matter of friendship--one incident of the many years’ friendship between my parents and all the Drurys. There was no question of any honorarium in the matter. My father’s appetite for teaching was such that he would, I am very sure, have much preferred keeping my brother and myself under his sole tuition. But he used to drive up to London in his gig daily to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, for he still struggled to hope on at his profession. (I remember that these drives down in the dark winter evenings became a source of some anxiety when a messenger travelling with despatches for the French Minister, who at that time rented Lord Northwick’s house at Harrow, was mysteriously murdered and his despatches stolen.) And it thus became necessary that some means should be found for preventing us boys from making _école buissonière_ in the fields and under the hedgerows.