return, and it was a great feat to get into our places before he
entered, adorned in awful majestic authority, shouting "Silence!" and
striking resounding blows with his cane on a desk or on some
unfortunate scholar's back.

Forty-seven years after leaving this fighting school, I returned on a
visit to Scotland, and a cousin in Dunbar introduced me to a minister
who was acquainted with the history of the school, and obtained for me
an invitation to dine with the new master. Of course I gladly
accepted, for I wanted to see the old place of fun and pain, and the
battleground on the sands. Mr. Lyon, our able teacher and thrasher, I
learned, had held his place as master of the school for twenty or
thirty years after I left it, and had recently died in London, after
preparing many young men for the English Universities. At the
dinner-table, while I was recalling the amusements and fights of my
old schooldays, the minister remarked to the new master, "Now, don't
you wish that you had been teacher in those days, and gained the honor
of walloping John Muir?" This pleasure so merrily suggested showed
that the minister also had been a fighter in his youth. The old
freestone school building was still perfectly sound, but the carved,
ink-stained desks were almost whittled away.

The highest part of our playground back of the school commanded a view
of the sea, and we loved to watch the passing ships and, judging by
their rigging, make guesses as to the ports they had sailed from,
those to which they were bound, what they were loaded with, their
tonnage, etc. In stormy weather they were all smothered in clouds and
spray, and showers of salt scud torn from the tops of the waves came
flying over the playground wall. In those tremendous storms many a
brave ship foundered or was tossed and smashed on the rocky shore.