n as a
master, and was living with Edward Lyttelton in a quaint, white-gabled
house called Baldwin's Shore, which commanded a view of Windsor Castle,
and overlooked the little, brick-parapeted, shallow pond known as
Barnes' Pool, which, with the sluggish stream that feeds it, separates
the college from the town, and is crossed by the main London road. It
was a quaint little house, which had long ago been a boarding-house, and
contained many low-coiled, odd-shaped rooms. Hugh was Edward Lyttelton's
private pupil, so that he was often in and out of the place. But I did
not see very much of him. He was a small, ingenuous-looking creature in
those days, light-haired and blue-eyed; and when a little later he
became a steerer of one of the boats, he looked very attractive in his
Fourth of June dress, as a middy, with a dirk and white duck trousers,
dangling an enormous bouquet from his neck. At Eton he did very little
in the way of work, and his intellect must have been much in abeyance;
because so poor was his performance, that it became a matter of
surprise among his companions that he had ever won a scholarship at all.

[Illustration: _Photo by Elliott & Fry_

THE THREE BROTHERS, 1882

E. F. Benson A. C. Benson R. H. Benson
at Marlborough. at Cambridge. at Mr. Cornish's School at Clevedon.
Aged 15. Aged 21. Aged 11.]

I have said that I did not know very much about Hugh at Eton; this was
the result of the fact that several of the boys of his set were my
private pupils. It was absolutely necessary that a master in that
position should avoid any possibility of collusion with a younger
brother, whose friends were that master's pupils. If it had been
supposed that I questioned Hugh about my pupils and their private lives,
or if he had been thought likely to tell me tales, we should both of us
have been branded. But as he had no wish to confide, and indeed little
enough to consult anyone about, and as I had no wish for sidelights, we
did not talk about his school life at all. The set of boys in which he
lived was a curious one; they were fairly clever, but they must have
been, I gathered afterwards, quite extraordinarily critical and
quarrelsome. There was one boy in particular, a caustic, spiteful, and
extremely mischief-making creature, who turned the set into a series of
cliques and parties. Hugh used to say afterwards that he had never known
anyone in his life with such an eye for other