only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a
wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not
one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the
Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation
after generation. I recall him most vividly against the background
of faded brown book-backs in the old library in which we less
destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the
stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his face. It
gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own. He had a
habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used
to come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said.
That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the
school."

He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
man captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans
had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.

Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a
Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a
disposition towards developments. City Merchants had no modern
side, and utilitarian spirits were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE
and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly
at our want of German. Moreover, four classes still worked
together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big Hall that had
once held in a common tumult the entire school. Gates used to come
and talk to us older fellows about these things.

"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. "But we ought to
get in some German, you know,--for those who like it. The army men