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