The Lighter Side of School Life

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AUTHOR OF A SAFETY MATCH WITH ILLUSTRATIONS REPRODUCED FROM PASTEL DRAWINGS BY LEWIS BAUMER BOSTON LE ROY PHILLIPS First Edition published October nineteen hundred fourteen; reprinted May nineteen fifteen Printed in Scotland by Ballantyne, Hanson, & Co. At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
reproduced from drawings by Lewis Baumer
These sketches originally appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, to the proprietors of which I am indebted for permission to reproduce them in book form.
IAN HAY

First of all there is the Headmaster of Fiction. He is invariably called The Doctor, and he wears cap and gown even when birching malefactors—which he does intermittently throughout the day—or attending a cricket match. For all we know he wears them in bed.
He speaks a language peculiar to himself—a language which at once enables you to recognise him as a Headmaster; just as you may recognise a stage Irishman from the fact that he says Begorrah! , or a stage sailor from the fact that he has to take constant precautions with his trousers. Thus, the Doctor invariably addresses his cowering pupils as Boys! —a form of address which in reality only survives nowadays in places where you are invited to have another with me —and if no audience of boys is available at the moment, he addresses a single boy as if he were a whole audience. To influential parents he is servile and oleaginous, and he treats his staff with fatuous pomposity. Such a being may have existed—may exist—but we have never met him. What of the Headmaster of Fact? To condense him into a type is one of the most difficult things in the world, for this reason. Most of us have known only one Headmaster in our lives—if we have known more we are not likely to say so, for obvious reasons—and it is difficult for Man (as distinct from Woman), to argue from the particular to the general. Moreover, the occasions upon which we have met the subject of our researches at close quarters have not been favourable to dispassionate character-study. It is difficult to form an unbiassed or impartial judgment of a man out of material supplied solely by a series of brief interviews spread over a period of years—interviews at which his contribution to the conversation has been limited to a curt request that you will bend over, and yours to a sequence of short sharp ejaculations.