ready beside it, had his mouth open to bite the outstretched finger on its way to the mark. He closes his letter by stating three uncomfortable things connected with his arrival—the loss of his toothbrush and his failure to clean his teeth for several days in consequence; his inability to find his blotting-paper, and his lack of a shoe-horn.

The games the Richmond boys played—football, wrestling, leapfrog and fighting—he slurred over contemptuously, they held no attraction for him.

A schoolboy or girl of the present day can have no idea of the discomforts of school life in Charles Dodgson’s time, and the boy whose gentle manners were the result of sweet home influence and association with girls, found the rough ways of the English schoolboy a constant trial. Strong and active as he was, he was always up in arms for those weaker and smaller than himself. Bullying enraged him, and distasteful as it was, he soon learned the art of using his fists for the protection of himself and others. These were the school-days of Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, and Little Paul Dombey. Of course, all schoolmasters were not like Squeers or Creakle, nor all schoolmasters’ wives like Mrs. Squeers, nor indeed all schools like Dotheboys’ Hall or Salem Hall, or Dr. Blimber’s cramming establishment, but many of the inconveniences were certainly prominent in the best schools.

Flogging was considered the surest road to knowledge; kind, honest, liberal-minded teachers kept a birch-rod and a ferrule within gripping distance, and the average schoolboy thus treated like a little beast, could be pardoned for behaving like one. In spring or summer the big, bare, comfortless schoolhouses were all very well, but when the days grew chill, the small boy shivered on his hard bench in his draughty corner, and in winter time the scarcity of fires was trying to ordinary flesh and blood. The poor unfortunate who rose at six, and had to fetch and carry his own water from an outdoor pump, or if he had taken the precaution to draw it the night before, had found it frozen in his pitcher, was not to be blamed if washing was merely a figure of speech.

Mr. and Mrs. Tate were most considerate to their boys, and Richmond was a model school of its class. Charles loved his “kind old schoolmaster” as he called him, and he was not alone in this feeling, for Mr. Tate’s influence over the boys was maintained through the affection and respect they had for him. Of course he let them “fight it out” among themselves according to the boy-nature; but the earnest little fellow with the grave face and the eager, questioning eyes, attracted him greatly, and he began to study him in his keen, kind way, finding much to admire and praise in the letters which he wrote to his father, and predicting for him a bright career. Admitting that he had found young Dodgson superior to other boys, he wisely suggested that he should never know this fact, but should learn to love excellence for its own sake, and not for the sake of excelling.

Charles made quite a name for himself during those first school days. Mathematics still fascinated him and Latin grew to be second nature; he stood finely in both, and while at Richmond he developed another taste, the love of composition, often contributing to the school magazine. The special story recorded was called “The Unknown One,” but doubtless many a rhyme and jingle which could be traced to him found its way into this same little magazine, not forgetting odd sketches which he began to do at a very early age. They were all rough, for the most part grotesque, but full of simple fun and humor, for the quiet studious schoolboy loved a joke.

Charles stayed at the Richmond school for three years; then he took the next step in an English boy’s life, he entered Rugby, one of the great public schools.

In America, a public school is a school for the people, where free instruction is given to all alike; but the English public school is another thing. It is a school for gentlemen’s sons, where tuition fees are far from small, and “extras” mount up on the yearly bills.

Rugby had become a very celebrated school when the great Dr. Arnold was Head-Master. Up to that time it was neither so well known nor so popular as Eton, but Dr. Arnold had governed it so vigorously that his hand was felt long after his untimely death, which occurred just four years before Charles was ready to enter the school. The Head-Master at that time was, strangely enough, named Tait, spelt a little differently from the Richmond schoolmaster. Dr. Tait, who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, was a most capable man, who governed the school for two of the three years that our Boy was a pupil. The last year, Dr. Goulburn was Head-Master.

Charles found Rugby a great change from the quiet of Richmond. He went up in February of 1846, the beginning of the second term, when football was in full swing. The teams practiced on the broad open campus known as “Big-side,” and a “new boy” could only look on and applaud the great creatures who led the game. Rugby was swarming with boys—three hundred at least—from small fourteen-year-olders of the lowest “form,” or class, to those of eighteen or twenty of the fifth and sixth, the highest forms. They treated little Dodgson in their big, burly, schoolboy fashion, hazed him to their hearts’ content when he first entered, shrugging their shoulders good-naturedly over his love of study, in preference to the great games of cricket and football.

To have a fair glimpse of our Boy’s life at this period, some little idea of Rugby and its surroundings might serve as a guide. Those who visit the school to-day, with its pile of modern, convenient, and ugly architecture, have no conception of what it was over sixty years ago, and even in 1846 it bore no resemblance to the original school founded by one Lawrence Sheriffe, “citizen and grocer of London” during the reign of Henry VIII. To begin with, it is situated in Shakespeare’s own country, Warwickshire on the Avon River, and that in itself was enough to rouse the interest of any musing, bookish boy like Charles Dodgson.

From “Tom Brown’s School Days,” that ever popular book by Thomas Hughes, we may perhaps understand the feelings of the “new boy” just passing through the big, imposing school gates, with the oriel window above, and entering historic Rugby.

What first struck his view was the great school field or “close” as they called it, with its famous elms, and next, “the long line of gray buildings, beginning with the chapel and ending with the schoolhouse, the residence of the Head-Master where the great flag was lazily waving from the highest round tower.”

As we follow Tom Brown through his first day, we can imagine our Boy’s sensations when he found himself in this howling wilderness of boys. The eye of a boy is as keen as that of a girl regarding dress, and before Tom Brown was allowed to enter Rugby gates he was taken into the town and provided with a cat-skin cap, at seven and sixpence.

“‘You see,’ said his friend as they strolled up toward the school gates, in explanation of his conduct, ‘a great deal depends on how a fellow cuts up at first. If he’s got nothing odd about him and answers straightforward, and holds his head up, he gets on.’”

Having passed the gates, Tom was taken first to the matron’s room, to deliver up his trunk key, then on a tour of inspection through the schoolhouse hall which opened into the quadrangle. This was “a great room, thirty feet long and eighteen high or thereabouts, with two great tables running the