scenes. The stage-setting, so to speak, is much as it must have
appeared to our predecessors, but the actual drama played on the stage
must have been so very different. I should have liked to have seen
these planters' houses a hundred years ago, swarming with guests,
whilst the cookhouses smoked bravely as armies of black slaves busied
themselves in preparing one of the gigantic repasts described by Lady
Nugent. Unfortunately to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the
thing, one would have been forced, in her words, "to eat like a
cormorant, and to drink like a porpoise," with the certainty of a
liver attack to follow.

Talking of bygone days, the Fourth-Form Room at Harrow has been
unchanged since Queen Elizabeth's time, and still retains all its
Elizabethan fittings: heavy, clumsy, solid oak armchairs for the
masters, each one equipped with a stout, iron-bound, oak table, and
strong oak benches for the boys. As a youngster, I liked to think that
I was sitting on the identical benches occupied, more than three
hundred years earlier, by Elizabethan youths in trunk hose and
doublets. In my youth I was much impressed in Canterbury Cathedral by
the sight of the deep grooves worn by the knees of countless thousands
of pilgrims to Thomas a Beckett's shrine in the solid stone of the
steps leading from the Choir to the retro-Choir, steps only to be
ascended by pilgrims on their knees. At Harrow the inch-thick oak
planks of the Elizabethan benches have been completely worn through in
places by the perpetual fidgeting of hundreds of generations of
schoolboys, which is as remarkable in its way as the knee grooves at
Canterbury, though the attrition is due to a different portion of the
human anatomy. As a boy I used to wonder how the trunk-hosed
Elizabethan Harrovians addressed each other, and whether they found it
very difficult to avoid palpable anachronisms in every sentence.