I do not think I profited much by my attendance at old Mark’s pupil-room. The boys whose lessons he was hearing stood in a row in front of his armchair, and I sat behind him, supposed to be intently occupied in conning the task he had set me, in preparation for the moment, when, the class before him having been dismissed, he would have little me, all alone, in front of him for a few minutes, while another class was mustering. How I hated it all! How very much more bitterly I hated it than I ever hated any subsequent school troubles! What a Pariah I was among these denizens of Mark’s and other pupil-rooms! For I was a “town boy,” “village boy” would have been a more correct designation; one of the very few, who by the terms of the founder’s will, had any right to be there at all; and was in consequence an object of scorn and contumely on the part of all the _paying_ pupils. I was a charity boy. But at Winchester subsequently I was far more of a charity boy, for William of Wykeham’s foundation provided me with food and lodging as well as tuition; whereas I claimed and received nothing save a modicum of the latter at the hands of those who enjoyed and administered John Lyon’s bounty. Yet, though at Winchester there were only seventy scholars and a hundred and thirty private pupils of the head master, or “commoners,” there was no trace whatsoever of any analogous feeling, no slightest arrogation of any superiority, social or other, on the part of the commoner over the collegian. In fact the matter was rather the other way; any difference between the son of the presumably richer man, and the presumably poorer, having been merged and lost sight of entirely in the higher scholastic dignity of the college boy.