urs, and pass it along if he saw you were
in trouble.

There was, and I think with some reason, a pride among the boys on
their appearance on certain occasions. It went by the name of "good
form." Thus on Sundays at morning chapel, we always wore a button-hole
flower if we could. My dear mother used to post me along a little box
of flowers every week--nor was it by any means wasted energy, for not
only did the love for flowers become a hobby and a custom with many of
us through life, and a help to steer clear of sloppiness in
appearance, but it was a habit quite likely to spread to the soul. But
beyond that, the picture of my dear mother, with the thousand worries
of a large school of small boys on her hands, finding time to gather,
pack, address, and post each week with her own hands so fleeting and
inessential a token of her love, has a thousand times arisen to my
memory, and led me to consider some apparently quite unnecessary
little labour of love as being well worth the time and trouble. It is
these deeds of love--not words, however touching--that never fade from
the soul, and to the last make their appeal to the wandering boy to
"arise" and do things.

Like everything else this fastidiousness can be overdone, and I
remember once a boy's legal guardian showing me a bill for a hundred
pounds sterling that his ward had incurred in a single term for cut
flowers. Yet "form" is a part of the life of all English schools, and
the boys think much more of it than sin. At Harrow you may not walk in
the middle of the road as a freshman; and in American schools and
universities, such regulations as the "Fence" laws at Yale show that
they have emulated and even surpassed us in these. It was, however, a
very potent influence, and we were always ridiculously sensitive about
breaches of it. Thus, on a certain prize day my friend "Mad G.,"
having singularly distinguished himself in his studies, his parents
came all the way from their home, at great expense to themselves, to
see their beloved and only son honoured. I presume that, though wild
horses would not drag anything out of the boy at school, he had
communicated to them the details of some little service rendered. For
to my horror I was stopped by his mother, whom I subsequently learned
to love and honour above most people, and actually kissed while
walking in the open quad--strutting like a peacock, I suppose, for I
remember feeling as if the bottom had suddenly fallen out