boys; he is not exactly disagreeable, but he derides all boys who are in the least degree shy, stupid, or unconventional.  He is quite a little man of the world, in fact.  Well, I don’t like that type of creature, and I tried to indicate to the father that I thought the boy was rather on the wrong lines.  He heard me with impatience, as though I was bothering him about matters which belonged to my province; and he ended by laughing, not very agreeably, and saying:  “Well, you don’t seem to have much of a case against Charlie; he appears to be fairly popular.  I confess that I don’t much go in for sentiment in education; if a boy does his work, and plays his games, and doesn’t get into trouble, I think he is on the right lines.”  And then he paid me an offensive compliment:  “I hear you make the boys very comfortable, and I am sure I am obliged to you for taking so much interest in him.”  He then went off for a little to see the boy.  He appeared at dinner, and I had invited two or three of the most intelligent of my colleagues.  Mr. Welbore simply showed off.  He told stories; he made mirthless legal jokes.  One of my colleagues, Patrick, a man of some originality, ventured to dispute an opinion of Mr. Welbore’s, and Mr. Welbore turned him inside out, by a series of questions, as if he was examining a witness, in a good-natured, insolent way, and ended by saying:  “Well, Mr. Patrick, that sort of thing wouldn’t do in a law-court, you know; you would have to know your subject better than that.”  I was not surprised, after dinner, at the alacrity with which my colleagues quitted the scene, on all sorts of professional excuses.  Then Mr. Welbore sate up till midnight, smoking strong cigars, and giving me his ideas on the subject of education.  That was a bitter pill, for he worsted me in every argument I undertook.

Sunday was a nightmare day; every spare moment was given up to Mr. Welbore.  I breakfasted with him, took him to chapel, took him to the boys’ luncheon, walked with him, sate with him, talked with him.  The strain was awful.  The man sees everything from a different point of view to my own.  One ought to be able to put up with that, of course, and I don’t at all pretend that I consider my point of view better than his; but I had to endure the consciousness that he thought his own point of view in all respects superior to mine.  He thought me a slow-coach, an old maid, a sentimentalist; and I had, too, the galling feeling that on the whole he approved of a drudge like myself taking a rather priggish point of view, and that he did not expect a schoolmaster to be a man of the world, any more than he would have expected a curate or a gardener to be.  I felt that the man was in his way a worse prig even than I was, and even more of a Pharisee, because he judged everything by a certain conventional standard.  His idea of life was a place where you found out what was the right thing to do; and that if you did that, money and consideration, the only two things worth