the Paulines would call those of St. Anthony "pigs" and the pigs
would call the Paulines "pigeons"--from the pigeons of St. Paul's
Cathedral. Now, however, St. Anthony's is no more, and St. Paul's
School has long moved to the suburbs and lies about seven minutes'
walk along the Hammersmith Road from Warwick Gardens. Gilbert
Chesterton was twelve when he entered St. Paul's (in January 1887)
and he was placed in the second Form.

His early days at school were very solitary, his chief occupation
being to draw all over his books. He drew caricatures of his masters,
he drew scenes from Shakespeare, he drew prominent politicians. He
did not at first make many friends. In the Autobiography he makes a
sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy, but it is a
distinction that could only be drawn by a man. And most men, I fancy,
would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the
transformation occurred. G.K. seems to put it at the beginning of
school life, but the fact that St. Paul's was a day-school meant that
the transition from home to school, usual in English public-school
education,* was never in his case completely made. No doubt he is
right in speaking in the _Autobiography_ of "the sort of prickly
protection like hair" that "grows over what was once the child," of
the fact that schoolboys in his time "could be blasted with the
horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name."
Nevertheless, he went home every evening to a father and mother and
small brother; he went to his friends' houses and knew their sisters;
school and home life met Daily instead of being sharply divided into
terms and holidays.

[* The terminology for English schools came into being largely before
the State concerned itself with education. A Private School is one