m gave him positive
pain, and the most slovenly boys would endeavour to get their filthy
rooms into some sort of order, "just to please old John." John was
passionately fond of flowers, and one would meet the most unlikely boys
with bunches of roses in their hands. If one inquired what they were
for, they would say half-sheepishly, "Oh, just a few roses I've bought.
I thought they would please old John; you know how keen the old chap is
on flowers." Now English schoolboys are not as a rule in the habit of
presenting flowers to their masters. For all his apparent simplicity,
John was not easy to "score off." I have known Fifth-form boys bring a
particularly difficult passage of Herodotus to John in "pupil-room,"
knowing that he was not a great Greek scholar. John, after glancing at
the passage, would say, "Laddie, you splendid fellows in the Upper
Fifth know so much; I am but a humble and very ignorant old man. This
passage is beyond my attainments. Go to your tutor, my child. He will
doubtless make it all clear to you; and pray accept my apologies for
being unable to help you," and the Fifth-form boy would go away feeling
thoroughly ashamed of himself. After his death, it was discovered from
his diary that John had been in the habit of praying for twenty boys by
name, every night of his life. He went right down the school list, and
then he began again. Any lack of personal cleanliness drove him
frantic. I myself have heard him order a boy with dirty nails and hands
out of the room, crying, "Out of my sight, unclean wretch! Go and
cleanse the hands God gave you, before I allow you to associate with
clean gentlemen, and write out for me two hundred times, 'Cleanliness
is next to godliness.'"

John took the First Fourth, and his little boys could always be
detected by their neatness and extreme cleanliness. Neither of these
can be called a characteristic of little boys in general, but the
little fellows made an effort to overcome their natural tendencies "to
please old John." When his hereditary enemy triumphed, and his reason
left him, hundreds of his old pupils wished to subscribe, and to
surround John for the remainder of his life with all the comforts that
could be given him in his afflicted condition. It was very
characteristic of John to refuse this offer, and to go of his own
accord into a pauper asylum, where he combined the duties of chaplain
and butler until his death. John was buried at Harrow, and by his own
w