o or three of the senior students came to bring to
me serious charges against the moral character of one of the junior
masters. They were prima facie well substantiated by witnesses, but
on further investigation it turned out that the whole affair had been
engineered merely because the master had broken up an undesirable
clique of theirs. Such habits have, of course, to be sternly repressed.

There is much greater diversity in the social status of the boys
in an Indian school than in English schools. In the Bannu Mission
School every class of the community is represented--from the son
of the rich landowner to that of the labourer, from the Brahmin to
the outcast--and not only do they get on well together, without the
poor boy having to feel by taunt or treatment that he is unwelcome
or despised, but I have often come across genuine acts of charity
which have been done quite naturally and without any ostentation;
in fact, they tried to keep it secret in more cases than one. Thus,
a poor boy, unable to buy his books, has had them supplied to him by
the richer boys in the class. In one case a poor boy was left quite
destitute by the death of his father, and some of the boys arranged
a small subscription month by month to enable him to remain at school.

The Bannu school course commences in the infant class, where little
toddles of five summers sit on grass-mats and learn their alphabet,
to the big lads of eighteen in the fifth form, who are preparing for
the matriculation of the Punjab University. Visitors are sometimes
surprised to be told that many of the boys in this class are married
and have children, but such is unfortunately still the case. At one
time even much younger boys married, but a school law was passed that
any pupil marrying under the age of sixteen would be expelled. Since
then some twenty or more boys have had to leave because their parents,
usually much against the boys' will, insisted on getting them married
below this age. But many marriages have been postponed, and there is
a healthier public feeling against early marriage, and we hope that
before long there will be no married boys in the school at all.

I place great importance on the influence of the school hostels. These
are the boarding-houses where those students whose homes are in the
remoter parts of the district reside, and the contrast between our
raw material, the uncouth, prejudiced village lad, and the finished
product, the gentlemanly,