The case would appear thus:—
“Shepard, a cadet who stood second in mathematics at the Academy, was prepared by Mr Hostler for twelve months, and then sent to finish details at Mr Rouse’s for three months, during part of which time he was ill with hooping-cough. He passed in well, and came out well. Honour, then, is due to Mr Hostler for his excellent training, and great credit is reflected on his school.”
I saw my young acquaintance, who was sent for at my request, as I declined to be made a parade of in the schoolroom, and bidding Mr Hostler farewell, I left his establishment, which I never entered again, and never saw Mr Hostler again, though the scenes through which I passed at his school even now sometimes haunt me in the form of nightmares, when I dream I am again a boy at that place, who has failed in his Euclid, and cannot make the three sides of a triangle join, and who is waiting for his three cuts on the hand.
Chapter Seventeen.
Finale.
My career at what may be termed the Academy (proper) terminated with the examinations named in the last chapter. I returned home to rest as it were on my laurels, for I had to pass no farther examinations in order to obtain my commission, and had merely to go through a practical course connected with the various branches in the Arsenal, and also a course of surveying, after which there was the public examination, which was a mere farce, and we were then commissioned in the order in which we stood.
Before finally leaving the Academy I once more paid a visit to Mr Rouse and dined with him, where I met a Cambridge man who had just left Cambridge and had taken a Master of Arts degree. When I left Woolwich my coarse in mathematics consisted of plane and spherical trigonometry, conic sections, statics and dynamics, properties of roofs and arches, hydrostatics, projectiles, and the deferential and integral calculus. In this course I had obtained a very good decimal, and therefore might be said to have a fair knowledge of the subjects. I was, therefore, anxious to compare my mathematical knowledge with that of a Master of Arts of Cambridge, and discover, if possible, how much longer it would take me to work up to the extent requisite to become M.A. To my surprise I found that the gentleman from Cambridge knew only as much mathematics as I did when I was in the second class, and, in fact, if I had been at Cambridge instead of at Woolwich, I should have been distinguished all my life as M.A., and should, of course, have been looked on as an authority on such matters as mathematics by people who had no other means of testing one’s qualifications than by the literary annex after one’s name.
I suggested to Mr Rouse that this system of conferring distinguishing honours on men from one or two Universities, which honours carried weight with the public, seemed unfair to those men who were trained at other well-known places, such as Woolwich, where no honours were given, but where they had gone beyond the course required to gain the honours at the Universities.