y who, under the influence of the Hundred Best Books, had quoted the
ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but influential grandfather, was withdrawn
without notice or compensation in the middle of the term. It intensifies
the tragedy of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no
essential respect did his school depart from the pattern of all other
properly-conducted preparatory schools.

In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English gentlemen.
He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened by disregard and
disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high forehead. His rather
tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses. He was an active man in
unimportant things, with a love for the phrase "ship-shape," and he
played cricket better than any one else on the staff. He walked in wide
strides, and would sometimes use the tail of his gown on the blackboard.
Like so many clergymen and schoolmasters, he had early distrusted
his natural impulse in conversation, and had adopted the defensive
precaution of a rather formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made
a part of him. His general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up
things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice,
keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was
only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished,
keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer
of dovecots--with its method of manual training for example--keeping up
ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself and every one about him,
keeping up his affection for his faithful second wife and his complete
forgetfulness of and indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse
and insubordination away there in London, who had once been his delight
and insurmountable difficulty. "After my visits to her," wrote Benham,
"he would show by a hundred little expressions and poses and acts how
intensely he wasn't noting that anything of the sort had occurred."

But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed to
keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his son.

The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend
gentleman's life. It is not improbable that his disposition to
monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate
disruption of his family. It left so few initiatives withi