terest; attached to the boys, and not ashamed of seeming to
care.

My only consolation is that I have talked to a good many boys who have
read the book; they have all been amused, interested, delighted. But
they say frankly that the boys are not like any boys they ever knew,
and, when I timidly inquire about the masters, they laugh rather
sheepishly, and say that they don't know about that.

I am sure that we schoolmasters have many faults; but we are really
trying to do better, and, as I said before, I only wish that a man of
Kipling's genius had held out to us a helping hand, instead of giving
us a push back into the ugly slough of usherdom, out of which many good
fellows, my friends and colleagues, have, however feebly, been
struggling to emerge.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
May 21, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have been wondering since I wrote last whether I
could possibly write a school story. I have often desired to try. The
thing has hardly ever been well done. Tom Brown remains the best. Dean
Farrar's books, vigorous in a sense as they are, are too sentimental.
Stalky & Co., as I said in my last letter, in spite of its amazing
cleverness of insight, is not typical. Gilkes' books are excellent
studies of the subject, but lack unity of theme; Tim is an interesting
book, but reflects a rather abnormal point of view; A Day of My Life at
Eton is too definitely humorous in conception, though it has great
verisimilitude.

In the first place the plot is a difficulty; the incidents of school
life do not lend themselves to dramatic situations. Then, too, the
trivialities of which school life is so much composed, the minuteness
of the details involved, make the subject a singularly complicated one;
another great difficulty is to give any idea of the conversations of
boys, which are mainly concerned with small concrete facts and
incidents, and are lacking in humour and flexibility.

Again, to speak frankly, there is a Rabelaisian plainness of speech on
certain subjects, which one must admit to be apt to characterise boys'
conversation, which it is impossible to construct or include, and yet
the omission of which subtracts considerable reality from the picture.
Genius might triumph over all these obstacles, of course, but even a
genius would find it very difficult to put himself back into line with
the immaturity and narrow views of boys; their credulity, their
preoccupations, their conventionality, their inar