punishment to the unassisted efforts of those who hold rule, rather than to
the calculating interference of another boy, who, though he may have shared
the offence, is unwilling to take his proportion of the result. A sneak,
therefore, has in all ages been invested with a badge of infamy, which no
amount of strictly scholastic success has ever availed to remove from him;
and his fellows, recognising that he has saved his own skin at the expense
of theirs, do their best to make up the difference to him in contempt and
abuse. Schoolboys are not distinguished for a fastidious reticence. If they
dislike, they never hesitate to say so, and they have a painfully downright
way of giving reasons for their behaviour, which is apt to jar on a
temperament so sensitive that its owner always and only treads the path of
high principle when self-interest points him in the same direction.

The school career of the future pastor was not, therefore, a very happy
one, for at school there are no feeble women to be captivated by
heartrending revelations of a noble nature at war with universal
wickedness, and all but shattered by the assaults of an unfeeling world.
Nor, strange to say, do schoolmasters, as a rule, value the boy who ranges
himself on their side in the eternal war between boys and masters. However,
he proceeded in due time to a University. There he let it be known that his
ultimate destination was the Church, but he had his own method of
qualifying for his profession. He was not afflicted with the possession of
great muscular strength, or of a very robust health. Neither the river nor
the football-field attracted him. Cricket was a bore, athletic sports were
a burden; the rough manners of the ordinary Undergraduates made him
shudder. However, since at College there are sets of all sorts and sizes,
he soon managed to fashion for himself a little world of effete and mincing
idlers, who adored themselves even more than they worshipped one another.
They drank deep from the well of modern French literature, and chattered
interminably of RICHEPIN, GUY DE MAUPASSANT, PAUL BOURGET, and the rest.