situation:--

"Would you your son should be a sot or dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once,
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise,
Else of a mannish growth and, five in ten,
For infidelity and lewdness, men."

My next school was more of a success; for Eagle House, Brookgreen, where
I was from eight to eleven, had for its owner and headmaster a most
worthy and excellent layman, Joseph Railton. Mr. Railton was gentle,
though gigantic, fairly learned, just and kindly. His school produced,
amongst others eminent, the famous naval author Kingston, well known
from cabin-boy to admiral; there was also Lord Paulet, some others of
noble birth, and the two Middletons, nick-named Yankees, whom years
after I visited at their ruined mansion in South Carolina after the
Confederate War. Through the personal good influence of honest "Old
Joe," and his middle-aged housekeeper, Mrs. Jones, our whole
well-ordered company of perhaps a hundred boys lived and learned, worked
and played purely, and happily together: so great a social benefactor
may a good school chieftain be.

I have little to regret in my Brook Green recollections; the annual fair
was memorable with Richardson's show and Gingel's conjuring, and the
walks for mild cricketing at Shepherd's Bush, and the occasional Sundays
at home; and how pleasant to a schoolboy was the generous visitor who
tipped him, a good action never forgotten; and the garden with its
flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the
much-prized emerald May-bugs; for the whole garden was liberally thrown