I remember also, more vividly than I could wish, the bullying to which I and others were subjected at Harrow. There was much of a very brutal description. And in this respect also the difference at Winchester was very marked. The theory of the two places on the subject was entirely different, with the result I have stated. At Harrow, in those days--how it may be now I know not--no “fagging” was authorised or permitted by the masters. No boy had any legitimate authority over any other boy. And inasmuch as it was, is, and ever will be, in every large school impossible to achieve such a Saturnian state of things, the result was that the bigger and stronger _assumed_ an authority supported by sheer violence over the smaller and weaker. At Winchester, on the other hand, the subjection of those below them in college to the “prefects” or upper class, was not only recognised but enforced by the authorities. It thus came to pass that many a big hulking fellow was subjected to the authority of a “prefect” whom he could have tossed over his head. It was an authority nobody dreamed of resisting; a matter of course; not a rule of the stronger supported by violence. And the result--contributed to, also, by other arrangements, of which I shall speak hereafter--was that anything of the nature of “bullying” was infinitely rarer at Winchester than at Harrow. Despite old Mark’s invariable good-nature and kindness, my hours in his study were very unhappy ones; and I was hardly disposed to consider as a misfortune a severe illness which attacked me and my brother Henry, and for the nonce put an end to them. Very shortly it became clear that we were both suffering from a bad form of typhus. How was such an attack to be accounted for? My father’s new house was visited, and examined, and found to be above suspicion. But further inquiry elicited the fact that we boys had passed a half hour before breakfast in watching the proceedings of some men engaged in cleaning and restoring an old drain connected with a neighbouring farm house. The case was clear! It would seem, however, that the proper mode of treatment was not so clear to the Harrow general practitioner--a village apothecary of the old school, who, strange as it may seem, was the only available _medico_ at Harrow in those far off days. He treated us with calomel, and very, very nearly let me slip through his hands. It would have been _quite_, but for a fortunate chance. Among our Harrow friends was a Mrs. Edwards, the widow of a once very well known bookseller--not a publisher, but a scholarly, and indeed learned, seller of old books--who had, I believe, left her a considerable fortune. She was a highly cultured, and very clever woman, and a special friend of my mother’s. Now it so happened that a Dr. Butt, a physician, her brother, or brother-in-law, I forget which, paid her a visit just at the time we boys were at the worst. Mrs. Edwards brought him to our bedsides.