From the old country home and its surroundings the lad of ten years went to a school which was probably as well-adapted to his temper and tastes as any which could have been selected. At any rate it was a school to which he became profoundly attached, and whose master he was to count among the dearest and closest friends of a lifetime. The “Gunn School,” or the “Gunnery,” as it came to be called, was one of the famous institutions of this country, a school which left its indelible mark upon many a boy whose maturity was to be eminent and useful in the national life. It was a school unique in its theory and without rivals in its practice. Its founder and head was Frederick W. Gunn, a native of Washington, Connecticut, where he spent his life, did his great and good work, and died in a ripe old age. He was a man of rare character and gifts. Large-hearted and large-minded, with a religious and ethical nature of the most positive kind, he was a man predestined to influence others, and mold the lives of youth. Though he was an “abolitionist” in days when that term carried with it intensest odium and social proscription, and a dissenter from conventional orthodoxy in a time when to differ from established standards was to write one’s self down an “infidel,” he was a successful teacher, and made and maintained a series of schools, which finally grew into the noble “Gunnery,” a term at first used by the boys facetiously, but so apt and so happy as to be officially adopted as the title of the school. One of his old pupils, writing of the character of the institution, says: “When Mr. Gunn called the school which his genius had established ‘a home for boys’ he stated the simple and exact truth.... Mr. and Mrs. Gunn both had the parental instinct so strong that they really took to their hearts each individual boy, and brooded over him as if he were their own flesh and blood.” This home-school and school-home in one was conducted as a miniature republic; its aim was all-round, symmetrical character; its method grew out of the hearty, wholesome, honest, and loving nature of its head; its spirit was justice and love. Perhaps it was not a school where “marks” counted for a great deal; and the drill in books may not have been as severe and systematic as in some institutions. But the boy who went to the “Gunnery” was pretty sure to imbibe some notions of honor, justice, kindliness, and obedience which he never forgot. As one of the old pupils writes: “We recall an era of uncurbed freedom in a spot [Illustration: _The Gunnery_ _Washington, Connecticut_] hallowed by home affections without home effeminacies; where every bad trait of a boy was systematically assailed and every good trait strengthened, so far as might be, so as to take its final place in an enduring character and robust manhood.” Gibson himself has given a tender and vivid picture of the school which played so large a part in his life, in the pages of “Pastoral Days”: