T. B.

The red Dragon,
Compton Fereday,
April 10, 1904.

Dear Herbert,—­I was really too busy to write last week, but I am going to try and make up for it.  This letter is going to be a diary.  Expect more of it.—­T.  B.

April 7.—­I find myself, after all, compelled to begin my walking tour alone.  At the last moment Murchison has thrown me over.  His father is ill, and he is compelled to spend his holidays at home.  I do not altogether like to set off by myself, but it is too late to try and arrange for another companion.  I had rather, however, go by myself than with some one who is not absolutely congenial.  One requires on these occasions to have a companion whose horizon is the same as one’s own.  I daresay I could find an old friend, who is not also a colleague, to go with me, but it would mean a certain amount of talk to bring us into line.  Then, too, I have had a very busy term; besides my form work, I have had a good deal of extra teaching to do with the Army Class boys.  It is interesting work, for the boys are interested, not in the subjects so much, as in mastering them for examination purposes.  Yet it matters little how the interest is obtained, as long as the boys believe in the usefulness of what they are doing.  But the result is that I am tired out.  I have lived with boys from morning to night, and my spare time has been taken up with working at my subjects.  I have had hardly any exercise, and but a scanty allowance of sleep.  Now I mean to have both.  I shall spend my days in the open air, and I shall sleep, I hope, like a top at nights.  Gradually I shall recover my power of enjoyment; for the worst of such weeks as I have been passing through is that they leave one dreary and jaded; one finds oneself in that dull mood when one cannot even realise beautiful things.  I hear a thrush sing in a bush, or the sunset flames broadly behind the elms, and I say to myself, “That is very beautiful if only I could feel it to be so!” Boys are exhausting companions—­they are so restless, so full-blooded, so pitilessly indifferent, so desperately interested in the narrow round of school life; and I have the sort of temperament that will efface itself to any extent, if only the people that I am concerned with will be content.  I suppose it is a feeble trait, and that the best schoolmasters have a magnetic influence over boys which makes the boys interested in the master’s subjects, or at least hypnotises them into an appearance of interest.  I cannot do that.  It is like a leaden weight upon me if I feel that a class is bored; the result is that I arrive at the same end in my own way.  I have learnt a kind of sympathy with boys; I know by instinct what will interest them, or how to put a tiresome thing in an interesting way.