n a "sick
cut" from the kindly old school doctor, was one of the more common
ways boys discovered of saving their chapel half--when it was a very
close call.

The school surgery was presided over in my day by a much-beloved old
physician of the old school, named Fergus, which the boys had so long
ago corrupted into "Fungi" that many a lad was caught mistakenly
addressing the old gentleman as Dr. Fungi--an error I always fancied
to be rather appreciated.

By going to surgery you could very frequently escape evening chapel--a
very desirable event if you had a "big brew" coming off in class-room,
for you could get things cooked and have plenty of room on the fire
before the others were out. But one always had to pay for the
advantage, the old doctor being very much addicted to potions. I never
shall forget the horrible tap in the corner, out of which "cough
mixture" flowed as "a healing for the nations," but which, nasty as it
was, was the cheapest price at which one could purchase the cut. Some
boys, anxious to cut lessons, found that by putting a little soap in
one's eye, that organ would become red and watery. This they practised
so successfully that sometimes for weeks they would be forbidden to do
lessons on account of "eye-strain." They had to use lotions,
eye-shades, and every spectacle possible was tried, but all to no
avail. Sometimes they used so much soap that I was sure the doctor
would suspect the bubbles.

I had two periods in sick-room with a worrying cough, where the time
was always made so pleasant that one was not tempted to hasten
recovery. Diagnosis, moreover, was not so accurate in those days as it
might have been, and the dear old doctor took no risks. So at the age
of sixteen I was sent off for a winter to the South of France, with
the diagnosis of congestion of the lungs.

One of my aunts, a Miss Hutchinson, living at Hyeres in the South of
France, was delighted to receive me. With a widowed friend and two
charming and athletic daughters, she had a very pretty villa on the
hills overlooking the sea. My orders--to live out of doors--were very
literally obeyed. In light flannel costumes we roamed the hills after
moths and butterflies, early and late. We kept the frogs in miniature
ponds in boxes covered with netting, providing them with bamboo
ladders to climb, and so tell us when it was going to be wet weather.
We had also enclosures in which we kept banks of trap-door spiders,
which used to af