Here would I sit in the shelter of the wooden screen which keeps away
draughts and noisy company, and turn the pages of my Livy for the tale of
Cincinnatus, and deeds of rustic heroes; or hear old Horace descant on
the gracious simplicity of life among the Sabines."

The boys thought quite otherwise. The kitchen was generally the last
room to be chosen. Perhaps the idyllic attractions did not balance the
drawback of living in the thoroughfare of the house. Nor could one fail
to sympathise with those who preferred the garret, a poor thing but their
own, in which two studious souls could hob-nob, or even the austere
whitewash, narrow skylight, and niggard dimensions of some monastic cell,
which held just the one student, his table, and his books. The editor of
the School Magazine, writing a month after our arrival, finds it "a queer
new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss the accustomed
pictures on the walls, the accustomed column of books rising on either
hand--even the familiar table-cloth and carpet, and to sit instead inside
the framework of a six-foot bed, with roof and walls forming the queerest
possible combinations of lines and angles, and hung with three different
patterns of paper." To woo the muses in a garret is the common fate of
genius; but most of the "students" (for so their landladies, misled by a
name, called the occupants of a study) were better off than this literary
gentleman. When fires came to be lighted in the winter, there was a
cheerful domesticity in the sight of the red coals, which is unknown to
the solitude of Uppingham studies, with their hot-water pipe that warms
but not exhilarates. In particular, one cheery well-furnished parlour,
where a blazing hearth threw its light over the well-worn bindings of a
select library brought with us from the Sixth-Form-room, and on the well-
contented faces of its two custodians, burns as a bright spot in our
memory of those winter days.