ldly wisdom. In his youth a great
traveller, he had brought home many observations, a few views, and at
least one theory. To him the school was the most important of human
institutions--more vital even than the home, because it held the first
real experience of social contact, of free intercourse with other minds
and lives coming from different households and embodying different
strains of blood. "My school," said he, "is the world in miniature. If I
can teach these boys to study and play together freely and with fairness
to one another, I shall make men fit to live and work together in
society. What they learn matters less than how they learn it. The great
thing is the bringing out of individual character so that it will find
its place in social harmony."

Yet never man knew less of character in the concrete than Master Ward.
To him each person represented a type--the scientific, the practical,
the poetic. From each one he expected, and in each one he found, to
a certain degree, the fruit of the marked quality, the obvious, the
characteristic. But of the deeper character, made up of a hundred
traits, coloured and conditioned most vitally by something secret and
in itself apparently of slight importance, he was placidly unconscious.
Classes he knew. Individuals escaped him. Yet he was a most
companionable man, a social solitary, a friendly hermit.

His daughter Dorothy seemed to me even more fair and appealing by
daylight than when I first saw her in the dusk. There was a pure
brightness in her brown eyes, a gentle dignity in her look and bearing,
a soft cadence of expectant joy in her voice. She was womanly in every
tone and motion, yet by no means weak or uncertain. Mistress of herself
and of the house, she ruled her kingdom without an effort. Busied with
many little cares, she bore them lightly. Her spirit overflowed into the
lives around her with delicate sympathy and merry cheer. But it was
in music that her nature found its widest outlet. In the lengthening
evenings of late August she would play from Schumann, or Chopin, or
Grieg, interpreting the vague feelings of gladness or grief which lie
too deep for words. Ballads she loved, quaint old English and Scotch
airs, folk-songs of Germany, "Come-all-ye's" of Ireland, Canadian
chansons. She sang--not like an angel, but like a woman.

Of the two under-masters in the school, Edward Keene was the elder.
The younger, John Graham, was his opposite in every respect. Stu