qual to salaries in
English schools of the same grade--was yet reasonable; and when it is
added that it was a day-school; that there was held only one session of
five hours, with a roomy interval for lunch, gymnastics and music; that
each teacher had a large, well-furnished and cleanly-kept room to
himself--a luxury which is rare in the best English schools; that each
department was under the charge of a separate teacher, who was never
required to step out of his own special walk--another school-virtue not
common in English schools; that the principal fulfilled my ideal of a
calm, judicious and discriminating headmaster,--it is no wonder that I
began to congratulate myself upon having at last fallen upon a school
that furnished a combination of what I consider the best features of
both the English and Scotch schools, to the exclusion of all that is
detestable and soul-harassing in either. "No more for me," I
soliloquized, "of presiding magisterially at the odious dinner-table, at
which not a whisper is tolerated, and even the irrepressible chuckle
over some accident to the earthenware is accounted a crime; no more of
solemn marching in procession on Sunday morning and evening to some
fantastic, farcical 'High Church,' whose funereal-mummeries served only
to mask the furtive deviltries of the brisker members of my charge; no
more onsets at tea-time, when returned home with the boys from an
exhausting walk, of infuriated farmers demanding vengeance for rifled
orchards and shattered fences; no more morning calls from elderly maiden
ladies in neighboring summer boarding-houses, reporting a hail of shot
from ubiquitous catapults during the night-watches; no more sitting up
o' nights, when on duty for the day, reading with the drones against the
approaching Oxford or Cambridge 'local,' and rushing stealthily up
stairs every now and then to pounce upon the perpetrators of hideous
catcalls." All this I had escaped from, and more. And now what a
contrast! Saturdays and Sundays were my own, and I could worship in the
Hebrew or Mohammedan temple, just as I chose; and for the rest of the
week I should have all day, after four hours' pleasant culling of
Horatian and Homeric flowers, to devote to some abstruse study, perhaps
local politics.

As if any one should expect perfection or perfect satisfaction (which is
the same thing) in this wicked, cross-grained world! First of all,
although it came last of all, it transpired toward the