When I was transferred to a private school, a great big place, very well managed in every way, I lived for a time in atrocious terror of everything and everybody. I was conscious of a great code of rules which I did not know or understand, which I might quite unwittingly break, and the consequences of which might be fatal. I was never punished or caned, nor was I ever bullied. But I simply effaced myself as far as possible, and lived in dread of disaster. The thought even now of certain high blank walls with lofty barred windows, the remembered smells of certain passages and corners, the tall form and flashing eye of our headmaster and the faint fragrance of Havana cigars which hung about him, the bare corridors with their dark cupboards, the stone stairs and iron railings--all this gives me a far-off sense of dread. I can give no reason for my unhappiness there; but I can recollect waking in the early summer mornings, hearing the screams of peacocks from an adjoining garden, and thinking with a dreadful sense of isolation and despair of all the possibilities of disaster that lay hid in the day. I am sure it was not a wholesome experience. One need not fear the world more than is necessary--but my only dream of peace was the escape to the delights of home, and the thought of the larger world was only a thing that I shrank from and shuddered at. No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, but how few they seemed and how clearly they stand out! I did not make friends among the boys; they were pleasant enough acquaintances, some of them, but not to be trusted or confided in; they had to be kept at arm's length, and one's real life guarded and hoarded away from them; because if one told them anything about one's home or one's ideas, it might be repeated, and the sacred facts shouted in one's ears as taunts and jests. But there was a little bluff master, a clergyman, with shaggy rippled red-brown hair and a face like a pug-dog. He was kind to me, and had me to lunch one Sunday in a villa out at Barnes--that was a breath of life, to sit in a homelike room and look at old Punches half the afternoon; and there was another young man, a master, rather stout and pale, with whom I shared some little jokes, and who treated me as he might treat a younger brother; he was pledged, I remember, to give me a cake if I won an Eton Scholarship, and royally he redeemed his promise. He died of heart disease a little while after I left the school. I had promised to write to him from Eton and never did so, and I had a little pang about that when I heard of his death. And then there was the handsome loud-voiced maid of my dormitory, Underwood by name, who was always just and kind, and who, even when she rated us, as she did at times, had always something human beckoning from her handsome eye. I can see her now, with her sleeves tucked up, and her big white muscular arms, washing a refractory little boy who fought shy of soap and water. I had a wild