ch other, how
little allowance we made for weakness or oddity, how easily we condoned
all faults in one who was good-humoured and strong! How the little web
of intrigue and gossip, of likes and dislikes, wove and unwove
itself! What hopeless Tories we were! How we stood upon our rights and
privileges! I have few illusions as to the innocence or the justice
or the generosity of boyhood; what boys really admire are grace and
effectiveness and readiness. And yet, looking back, one has parted
with something, a sort of zest and intensity that one would fain
have retained. I felt that I would have given much to be able to have
communicated a few of the hard lessons of experience that I have learnt
by my errors and mistakes, to these jolly youngsters; but there again
comes in the pathos of boyhood, that one can make no one a present of
experience, and that virtue cannot be communicated, or it ceases to be
virtue. They were bound, all those ingenuous creatures, to make their
own blunders, and one could not save them a single one, for all one's
hankering to help. That is of course the secret, that we are here for
the sake of experience, and not for the sake of easy happiness. Yet one
would keep the hearts of these boys pure and untarnished and strong, if
one could, though even as one walked among them one could see faces on
which temptation and sin had already written itself in legible signs.

The cricket drew to an end; the shadows began to lengthen on the turf.
The mimic warriors were disbanded. The tea-tables made their appearance
under the elms, where one was welcomed and waited upon by cheerful
matrons and neat maidservants, and delightfully zealous and inefficient
boys. One had but to express a preference to have half-a-dozen
plates pressed upon one by smiling Ganymedes. If schools cannot alter
character, they certainly can communicate to our cheerful English boys
the most delightful manners in the world, so unembarrassed,
courteous, easy, graceful, without the least touch of exaggeration or
self-consciousness. I suppose one has insular prejudices, for we are
certainly not looked upon as models of courtesy or consideration by our
Continental neighbours. I suppose we reserve our best for ourselves.
I expressed a wish to look at some of the new buildings, and a young
gentleman of prepossessing exterior became my unaffected cicerone. He
was not one who dealt in adjectives; his highest epithet of praise was
"pretty decent," bu