since. I would give a good deal now to have a verbatim report of
that lecture of his.

When the lecture of the afternoon was over, the club amused itself.
Attendance was no longer compulsory. Boys came and went as they
chose. Order was maintained and enforced by a committee of the boys
themselves. It met once a week, and of all the committees I have ever
known that one was the most rigidly businesslike. I cannot imagine
where the secretary gained his experience of the conduct of public
business; but his appeals to the chair when any one wandered from the
subject under discussion were always made with reason, and he
understood the difference between an amendment and a substantive
resolution.

The only difficulty we ever had with that committee arose from its
passion for making rules. Our idea for the management of the club was
to have as few rules as possible. The committee, if unchecked, would
have out-Heroded the War Office itself in multiplying regulations. I
am inclined to think that it is a mistake to run institutions on
purely democratic lines, not because reasonable liberty would
degenerate into licence, but because there would be no liberty at
all. If democracy ever comes to its own, and the will of the people
actually prevails, we may all find ourselves so tied up with laws
regulating our conduct that we will wish ourselves back under the
control of a tyrant.

It was during those hours of recreation that Miss N. reigned over the
club. She ran a canteen for the boys, boiling eggs, serving tea,
cocoa, malted milk, bread-and-butter, and biscuits. She played games.
She started and inspired sing-songs. She listened with sympathy which
was quite unaffected to long tales of wrongs suffered, of woes and of
joys. She was never without a crowd of boys round her, often clinging
to her, and the offers of help she received must have been
embarrassing to her.

Miss N. had a little room of her own in the club. She furnished it
very prettily, and we used to pretend to admire the view from the
windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in
camp to make a sketch from that window. The artist shrank from the
task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a
hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and
a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two
incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare
say the artist was right in shrinking f