Since that new Tower of Babel was erected, Westminster has watched other foundations arguing and striving to discover the correct pronunciation of classical Latin. Despite the periodical rebukes of its rivals, it has held stubbornly to its course, knowing that there is no sure means of recreating the speech of Cicero and that Westminster at least is too deeply bedded in the past to bend before each new breeze of educational fashion. A hundred customs are preserved to teach new generations that progress need not be divorced from the historic sense: when the bell rings for prayers at the end of afternoon school, a Second Election knocks with his cap at the doors of the form-rooms adjoining school and calls out, "_Instat quinta_", or, on "plays" (half-holidays), "_Instat sesquiduodecima_", although the actual hour is now nearly one o'clock; a Second Election has knocked thus since the time was told from a single clock and shouted through the school by a junior; before prayers begin, the doors are locked, and, when they are opened, one of the School Monitors[2] mounts guard outside to repel a chance raid by the "sci's"[3] of the neighbourhood who in less orderly days carried on a town-and-gown warfare against the school. At the lowest, such customs are a picturesque survival, like the Latin play acted in College Dormitory, the Pancake Greeze on Shrove Tuesday, the countless phrases and customs which only a Westminster understands and which all Westminsters love; perhaps, too, they foster, in the alien and the iconoclast, a sense of the past. Abbey and School are a monument to continuity and ordered progress; in 1906, they were a monument at which the leaving seniors had been involuntarily staring for half a dozen years. II It is probable that few of them had much attention to spare for the sermon on that Election Sunday. At eighteen they had spent a third of their life at Westminster; it is a foundation in which son succeeds father and brother follows brother, as witness the carved and painted names of Madans and Waterfields, Goodenoughs and Phillimores up School, and on a September night of 1900 tradition had set them in the footsteps of their families and had sought a place for them in the old houses, there to serve and perhaps to suffer, to learn and, later, to rule. "You will sometimes be punished when you do not deserve it", was the wise parting advice of one preparatory-school headmaster; "before giving vent to your indignation, reflect how much oftener you have deserved punishment without receiving it."