with a very independent
tone of tradition; but nowadays private schools are smaller and much
more domesticated. The boys live like little brothers in the company
of active and kindly young masters; and then they are plunged into the
rougher currents of public schools, with their strange and in many
ways barbarous code of ethics, their strong and penetrating
traditions. Here the boys, who have hitherto had little temptation to
be anything but obedient, have to learn to govern themselves, and to
do so among conventions which hardly represent the conventions of the
world, and where the public opinion is curiously unaffected either by
parental desires, or by the wishes, expressed or unexpressed, of the
masters. A house-master is often in the position of seeing a new set
of boys come into power in his house whom he may distrust; but the
sense of honour among the boys is so strong that he is often the last
person to hear of practices and principles prevailing in his house of
which he may wholly disapprove. He may even find that many of the
individual boys in his house disapprove of them too, and yet be unable
to alter a tone impressed on the place by a few boys of forcible, if
even sometimes unsatisfactory, character. But at the time at which
these stories were written the tone of my own house was sound,
sensible, and friendly; and I had the happiness of living in an
atmosphere which I knew to be wholesome, manly, and pure. I used to
tell or read stories on Sunday evenings to any boys who cared to come
to listen; and I remember with delight those hours when perhaps twenty
boys would come and sit all about my study, filling every chair and
sofa and overflowing on to the floor, to listen to long, vague stories
of adventure, with at all events an appearance of interest and
excitement.

One wanted to do the best for the boys, to put fine ideas, if one
could, into their heads and hearts. But direct moral exhortation to
growing boys, feeling the life of the world quickening in their veins,
and with vague old instincts of love and war rising uninterpreted in
their thoughts, is apt to be a fruitless thing enough. It is not that
they do not listen; but they simply do not understand the need of
caution and control, nor do they see the unguarded posterns by which
evil things slip smiling into the fortress of the soul.

Every now and then I used to try to shape a tale which in a figure
might leave an arresting or a restraining thought