all the good young men to smoke prodigiously,
by scattering revolutionary verses about the college, and finally by
collecting and burning in one grand bonfire every copy of an obnoxious
text-book under which the students had long suffered."

This was indeed the germ of the man as we all knew him long afterwards.

Runciman left the college to take up the mastership of a London Board
School in a low part of Deptford; and here he soon gained an
extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums
in London. Mr. Thomas Wright, the "Journeyman Engineer," has already
told in print elsewhere the story of Runciman's descent into the
depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless,
starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school,
and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the
squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little
fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a
group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off. From the
children, his good influence extended to the parents; and it was an
almost every-day occurrence for visitors from the slums to burst into
the school to fetch the master to some coster who was "a-killin' his
woman." The brawny young giant would dive into the courts where the
police go in couples, clamber ricketty stairs, and "interview" the
fighting pair. "His plan was to appeal to the manliness of the
offender, and make him ashamed of himself; often such a visit ended in
a loan, whereby the 'barrer' was replenished and the surly husband set
to work; but if all efforts at peacemaking were useless, this new
apostle had methods beyond the reach of the ordinary missionary--he
would (the case deserving it) drop his mild, insinuating, persuasive
tones, and not only threaten to pulp the incorrigible blackguard into
a jelly, but proceed to do it."

Runciman, however, was much more in fibre than a mere schoolmaster. He
worked hard at his classes by day; he worked equally hard by night at
his own education, and at his first attempts at journalism. He
matriculated at London University, and passed his first B.Sc.
examination. At one and the same time he was carrying on his own
school, in the far East End, contributing largely to an educational
paper, _The Teacher_, and writing two or three pages a week in
_Vanity Fair_, which he long sub-edited. His powers of work were
enormous, and he system