During the past week there has taken place, almost without our
knowledge, a great migration of boys. From their homes, out on to the
roads and railways, has been pouring a flood of big boys, middle-sized
boys, small boys, old boys, new boys, all tending towards the various
schools where they are supposed to make all the best parts of human
knowledge their own and to live a life of dignified abstraction from
the troubles of the world, in the midst of their own _argot_ and their
own special traditions.
Of the big boys and the middle-sized boys I have little to say. They
are already imbued, if one may say so, with the influence of their
school, and can hold their own with the masters and their fellow-boys.
Much as they enjoy their holidays, they show no undue reluctance to
take up again the burden of their studies at a place which they will
afterwards consider as having given them some of the happiest days
of their lives. Many of them indeed are already or are in process of
becoming the trusted coadjutors of the headmaster and his colleagues
in the work of maintaining good order and discipline in the school.
They are monitors--tremendous word!--or prefects or præpostors, and
their _mitis sapientia_, no less than their muscular strength, causes
them to be feared and venerated.
Of such awful beings one must not speak lightly lest some terrific
fate reserved for scoffers overtake one. No, my concern at present
is rather with the little boys who have gone up for the first time
to their preparatory school, those forlorn scraps of humanity who are
beginning a life entirely new to them in all its details. Hitherto,
except for visits to the seaside with their parents and family, they
have not spent a night away from home. Now they are separated
from their parents and plunged into a world of perfect strangers.
Everything is done to make them at ease and comfortable in their new
surroundings; the headmaster is kindness itself, the matron beams on
them with smiles and fortifies them with encouragement; but just at
first the wrench for the little fellows is great. In a day or two,
however, they will begin to acclimatise themselves; the strangeness
will begin to wear off; and having borne up bravely against their
first sense of loneliness in the midst of a crowd they will gradually
become parts of the machine to the making of which many gentle and
sympathising hands for years past have contributed.
"Schools are not what they were," says one of my friends. "There is
no bullying nowadays and little roughness of any kind. Masters are
not looked upon as the natural enemies of boys. Corporal punishment,
except for the gravest offences, is abolished. Whereas, formerly,
little boys were at once sucked into the vortex of a Public School,
there are now Preparatory Schools, where Tommie and Dickie and Harry,
aged from nine to ten, learn the business of Public Schooling in
a manner suited to their age and capacity. When we were boys," he
continues, "these admirable buffer states were so few that they might
almost be said not to exist at all; they now flourish everywhere. The
path of the little boy is thus made easier for him."
"But," I said, "is a little boy, then, never brought to a sense of
his unimportance by being physically, if not morally, kicked? Is he to
pass his life in a condition of Sybaritic softness?"
"You need not," he said, "worry about that. Softness makes no appeal
to the average English boy."
When therefore, on a day in last week, it happened to me to take a
little boy I happen to know to his Preparatory School on his first day
of his first term there, I did so with no undue depression. "Be a good
boy," I said to him; "never tell a lie, never push yourself forward,
and don't swank about yourself." It was good advice so far as it went,
but it did not make any great impression on him, for he only answered,
"Of course," or "Of course I shan't," to every item that I put before
him. I wonder how many fathers have recently inculcated these and
similar high-toned principles on their little boys, only to meet with
the same uninterested acquiescence. And even our parting was not so
dejected as it might have been, for by that time another new boy had
come upon the scene, and he and mine had been irresistibly drawn to
one another, and were chatting gaily when it was time for me to go.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE CELEBRITY.
THIS IS BILLY SMIFF, 'IM WOT REMEMBERS THE TIME WHEN THERE WASN'T NO
WAR.]
* * * * *