best informed man of his year. His fellow candidates remember even now
his appearance during scholarship week. Like David, he was ruddy of
countenance, like Saul he towered head and shoulders above the rest,
and a mass of fair hair fell over his forehead. Whene'er he took his
walks abroad he wore a large soft hat, and a large soft scarf, and
carried a stick that was large but not soft."

To this graphic description I will add a second one. "He was a
splendid all-round athlete," says another friend, who knew him at this
time, in the British and Foreign School Society's London college. "Six
feet two or three in height, and with a fine muscular development, he
could box, wrestle, fence, or row with all comers, and beat them with
ridiculous ease. No one could have been made to believe that he would
die, physically worn out, before he was forty. His intellectual
mastery was as unquestioned as his physical superiority; he always
topped the examination lists, to the chagrin of some of the lecturers,
whom he teased sadly by protesting against injustice the moment it
peeped out, by teaching all the good young men to smoke prodigiously,
by scattering revolutionary verses about the college, and finally by
collecting and burning in one grand bonfire every copy of an obnoxious
text-book under which the students had long suffered."

This was indeed the germ of the man as we all knew him long afterwards.

Runciman left the college to take up the mastership of a London Board
School in a low part of Deptford; and here he soon gained an
extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums
in London. Mr. Thomas Wright, the "Journeyman Engineer," has already
told in print elsewhere the story of Runciman's descent into the
depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless,