Perhaps the most markedly distinctive feature of the school life was the degree in which we were uninterfered with by any personal superintendence. The two masters came into the school-room to hear the different classes at the hours which have been mentioned, also, when we were “in chambers” in the evening, either during the hour of study which intervened between the six o’clock dinner and the eight o’clock prayers in the chapel, or during the subsequent hour between that and nine o’clock, when all went, or ought to have gone, to bed; and subsequently to that, when all were supposed to be in bed and asleep, we were at any moment liable to the sudden unannounced visit of the “hostiarius” or second master. The visit was a mere “going round.” If all was in order, it passed in silence, and was over in a minute. If any tea-things were surprised, they were broken, as before mentioned. If beer, or traces of the consumption of beer, were apparent, that was all right. The supply of a provision of that refreshment was recognised, it being a part of the duty of the bedmakers to carry every evening into each of the seven “chambers” a huge “nipperkin” of beer, “to last,” as I remember one of the bedmakers telling me when I first went into college, “for all night.” The supply, as far as my recollection goes, was always considerably in excess of the consumption. If all was not in order, “the prefect in course”--_i.e._ the prefect who in each chamber was responsible for due order during the current week--was briefly told to speak with the master next morning. And this comprises about all the personal intercourse that took place between us and the masters. Not that it is to be understood that any hour of our lives was left to our own discretion as to the employment of it; but this was attained by no immediate personal superintendence or direction. The systematised routine was so perfect, and so similar in its operation to the movements of some huge irresistible machine, that the disposal of each one of our hours seemed to be as natural, as necessary, and as inevitable as the waxing and waning of the moon. And the impression left on my mind by eight years’ experience of such a system is, that it was pre-eminently calculated to engender and foster habitual conceptions of the paramount authority of _law_, as distinguished from the dictates of personal notions or caprices; of self-reliance, and of conscious responsibility in the individual as forming an unit in an organised whole. Of course the eighteen prefects were to a much smaller degree coerced by the machine, and to a very great degree active agents in the working of it. And I was a prefect during three years of my eight in college. But at first, when a little fellow of, say, ten years old, entered this new world, it was not without a desolate sensation of abandonment, which it needed a month or two’s experience to get the better of.