Chapel and Great School.

It was Sonia's first opportunity of seeing over Melton, and she begged me to miss nothing. We crossed the worn flags of Great Court to the waterless fountain in the middle, lingered to admire the Virginia creeper swathing the crumbling grey walls as a mantle of scarlet silk, and passed through the iron-studded oak door of Matheson's. She inspected our row of studies and looked out through the closely barred windows to the practice ground of Little End, where the groundman and two assistants were erecting goal posts. For a while we wandered round Hall examining the carved tables and forms, the giant chimney-piece from which new boys had to sing their melancholy songs on the first Saturday of term, the great silver shields that the house had held in unbroken tenure for nine years, and the consciously muscular Cup Team groups that adorned the walls in two lines above the lockers.

Leaving Matheson's we strolled through Cloisters, and I pointed out the bachelor masters' quarters on one side and on the other the famous "Fighting Green," in which no fights had taken place within human memory. We put our heads inside Chapel, crossed into Great School and walked its length to the dais where stood Ockley's Chair, Bishop Adam's Birch Table and the carved seats of the Monitorial Council running in a half-circle like the places of the priests in the Theatre of Dionysus. I was still descanting on the dignity of that same Council, of which I had lately become a member, when a bell rang faintly in the distance, and we had to retrace our steps to meet the Entrance Examination candidates, who were pouring out of School Library and scattering in search of their anxious parents or guardians.

Sam Dainton headed the stream of inky-fingered twelve-year-olds, only pausing in his precipitant course down School Steps to roll his examination paper into a hard ball and thrust it inside the collar of a smaller, unknown and—so far as I could see—entirely inoffensive fellow-candidate.

"How did you get on?" asked Sonia.

"Oh, I dunno," Sam answered modestly; and then to me, "I say, Oakleigh, who were Abana and Pharpar?"

I made some discreet reference to the rivers of Damascus.

"Golly!" he moaned, with a face of woe. "I said they were the jewels in the breastplate of the High Priest. Never mind. Can't be helped. The chap in front of me said they were Eli's two sons, but that's rot, 'cos they were Gog and Magog. I got that right. Did you come over alone?"

"Your father's here," I said. "He's bribing Burgess not to read your papers. We'd better get back to Big Gateway."

We were half-way across Great Court when one of the Head's library windows opened, and Burgess, with his quaint, mannered courtesy, asked permission to have a word with me if I could spare him the time. I entered what was then, and probably is still, the untidiest room in England. Since the death of his wife ten years before, Burgess had ruled, or been ruled, with the aid of a capable housekeeper whose tenure of office depended on her undertaking never to touch a book or paper in the gloomy, low-ceilinged library. From that bargain she can never have departed. Overflowing the shelves and tables, piled up in the embrasures of the windows, littered carelessly in fireplace or wastepaper basket, lay ten years' accumulation of reports, complaints, presentation copies, text-books, magazines and daily papers.

"Some day it must all be swept and garnished, laddie," he would say when the last of twelve unsmokable pipes had disappeared behind the coal box. "But I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world.... Never take to smoking, laddie; it's a vile, unclean practice." And pending the day when the Augean stable was to be cleansed, he would walk down to Grantham's, the big Melton bookseller, cram the pockets of his cassock with new books, pick his way slowly back to the school, reading as rapidly as his tobacco-stained forefinger could hack the pages, and drop the newest acquisition in the handiest corner of the dusty, dim library.

"Laddie, there is a stranger within our gates, seeking admittance. He will not be denied."

Burgess's meaning was seldom to be grasped in his first or second sentence. I waited while he fumbled for a pipe in the pocket of the old silk cassock, without which none of us had ever seen him. By 1898, at the age of five-and-fifty, his physical appearance had run through the gamut of its changes and become fixed. When last we met, seventeen years later, his body was no more thin or bent, his face no more cadaverous, his brown eyes no more melancholy, his voice no more tired and his long white hair no whit less thick than on that September afternoon. And thus he will remain till a puff of wind stronger than the generality blows away the ascetic, wasted frame, and the gentle, sing-song voice is heard no more.

"Where is the divinity that doth hedge a king about?" he demanded of Dainton, or me, or the world at large. "I sat in this, my Holy Place, when a serving-man told me that one stood without and would have speech with me. I bade him begone. 'He insists,' said my serving-man." Burgess sighed and gently shrugged his shoulders. "The sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me. I bade him enter, and there came to me a lad no bigger than a man's hand. 'Thy name and business, laddie?' I asked. He told me he was known to men as 'David O'Rane,' a wanderer for the first time setting foot in the Promised Land. His speech was the speech of men in far places, who go down to the sea in ships and behold the wonders of the Lord. Shortly he bade me 'See here,' and stated that he proposed to come to my old school anyway, and that was the way he regarded the proposition."

"An American, sir?" I asked.

"An Irishman from thine own Isle of Unrest, laddie," Burgess answered. "Journeying from Dan to Beersheba, and pricking through America on his way."

He paused, and Dainton asked what had happened next.

"He is fifteen years of age—a year too old by the rules. My Shibboleths were demanded of the young men at nine-thirty this morning; by the rules he is half a day too late. Rules, the laddie told me, were for ordinary men at ordinary times. 'I, at least,' I said, 'am an ordinary man.' And he smiled and held his peace. 'Who will rid me of this proud scholar?' I asked, and he answered not a word. I threw him books, and he translated them—Homer and Thucydides and the dark places of Theocritus. 'Thou art too old, laddie,' I told him, 'for me to take thee in.' He walked to the door and I asked him whither he went. 'To a decent school,' he made answer. 'No decent school will take Melton's rejections,' I told him. 'Then let them share Melton's shame,' he rejoined. I bade him tarry and tell me of his wanderings. He sits within."

Burgess sighed and relit his pipe. I know few men who smoke more matches.

"Are you admitting him, sir?" I asked.

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping," answered Burgess. He turned to Dainton and murmured, "You recall the Liberator?"

Dainton's eyebrows moved up in quick surprise. "Oh, poor boy!" he ejaculated. It was some while before I was to understand the allusion or the comment, and I had little time now to speculate, as Burgess turned to address me.

"Laddie, he will be in Mr. Matheson's house, and will sit at the feet of Mr. Villiers in the Under Sixth. Were I a just man, I would place him in the Sixth, but I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this world. He must learn humility of spirit. He must fag—like Dainton minor; and be flogged like Dainton minor if he break our foolish rules. He must wait for a study and suffer on the altar of sport in all weathers, as a hundred thousand have done before him. I have communed secretly