Brown's Schooldays" has been called by more than one
critic the best story of schoolboy life ever written, and
three generations of readers have endorsed the opinion. Its
author, Thomas Hughes, born at Uffington, Berkshire, England,
Oct. 19, 1822, was himself, like his hero, both a Rugby boy
under Dr. Arnold and the son of a Berkshire squire, but he
denied that the story was in any real sense autobiographical.
Matthew Arnold and Arthur H. Clough, the poet, were Hughes's
friends at school, and in later life he became associated with
Charles Kingsley and Frederick Denison Maurice on what was
called the Christian Socialist movement. A barrister by
profession, Thomas Hughes became a county court judge, and
lived for many years in that capacity at Chester. Besides "Tom
Brown's Schooldays," published in 1857, Hughes also wrote "Tom
Brown at Oxford" (1861), biographies of Livingstone, Bishop
Fraser, and Daniel Macmillan, and a number of political,
religious and social pamphlets. He died on March 22, 1896.

_I.--Tom Goes to Rugby_

Squire Brown, J.P. for the county of Berks, dealt out justice and mercy,
in a thorough way, and begat sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and
grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times. And his wife dealt
out stockings and shirts and smock frocks, and comforting drinks to the
old folks with the "rheumatiz," and good counsel to all.

Tom was their eldest child, a hearty, strong boy, from the first given
to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and fraternising with all
the village boys, with whom he made expeditions all round the
neighbourhood.

Squire Brown was a Tory to the backbone; but, nevertheless, held divers
social principles not generally supposed to be true blue in colour; the
foremost of which was the belief that a man is to be valued wholly and
solely for that which he is himself, apart from all externals whatever.
Therefore, he held it didn't matter a straw whether his son associated
with lords' sons or ploughmen's sons, provided they were brave and
honest. So he encouraged Tom in his intimacy with the village boys, and
gave them the run of a close for a playground. Great was the grief among
them when Tom drove off with the squire one morning, to meet the coach,
on his way to Rugby, to school.

It had been resolved that Tom should travel down by the Tally-ho, which
passed through Rug