School, one[9] of
the Editors overtook me and said--

"We want you to contribute to _The Harrovian_. We are only going to
employ fellows who can write English--not such stuff as 'The following
boys _were given prizes_.'" Purism indeed!

Here began my journalistic career. For three years I wrote a
considerable part of the paper, and I was an Editor during my last year,
in conjunction with my friends Dumbar Barton and Walter Sichel.

Harrow is sometimes said to be the most musical of Public Schools; and
certainly our School Songs have attained a wide popularity. I believe
that "Forty Years on" is sung all over the world. But, when I went to
Harrow, we were confined to the traditional English songs and ballads,
and to some Latin ditties by Bradby and Westcott, which we bellowed
lustily but could not always construe. E. E. Bowen's stirring, though
often bizarre, compositions (admirably set to music by John Farmer)
began soon after I entered the school, and E. W. Howson's really
touching and melodious verses succeeded Bowens' some ten years after I
had left. Other song-writers, of greater or less merit, we have had; but
from first to last, the thrilling spell of a Harrow concert has been an
experience quite apart from all other musical enjoyments. "The singing
is the thing. When you hear the great body of fresh voices leap up like
a lark from the ground, and rise and swell and swell and rise till the
rafters seem to crack and shiver, then you seem to have discovered all
the sources of feeling." This was the tribute of a stranger, and an
Harrovian has recorded the same emotion:--"John was singing like a lark,
with a lark's spontaneous delight in singing; with an ease and
self-abandonment which charmed eye almost as much as ear. Higher and
higher rose the clear, sexless notes, till two of them met and mingled
in a triumphant trill. To Desmond, that trill was the answer to the
quavering, troubled cadences of the first verse; the vindication of the
spirit soaring upwards unfettered by the flesh--the pure spirit, not
released from the human clay without a fierce struggle. At that moment
Desmond loved the singer--the singer who called to him out of heaven,
who summoned his friend to join him, to see what he saw--'the vision
splendid.'"[10]

I am conscious that, so far, I have treated the Moloch of Athletics with
such scant respect that his worshippers may doubt if I ever was really a
boy. Certainly my physical inability to pla