NUMBER ONE THE NOVICE
Arthur Robinson, B.A., late exhibitioner of St. Crispin's College, Cambridge, having obtained a First Class, Division Three, in the Classical Tripos, came down from the University at the end of his third year and decided to devote his life to the instruction of youth.
In order to gratify this ambition as speedily as possible, he applied to a scholastic agency for an appointment. He was immediately furnished with type-written notices of some thirty or forty. Almost one and all, they were for schools which he had never heard of; but the post in every case was one which the Agency could unreservedly recommend. At the foot of each notice was typed a strongly worded appeal to him to write (at once) to the Headmaster, explaining first and foremost that he had heard of this vacancy through our Agency. After that he was to state his degree (if any); if a member of the Church of England; if willing to participate in School games; if musical; and so on. He was advised, if he thought it desirable, to enclose a photograph of himself.
A further sheaf of such notices reached him every morning for about two months; but as none of them offered him more than a hundred-and-twenty pounds a year, and most of them a good deal less, Arthur Robinson, who was a sensible young man, resisted the temptation, overpowering to most of us, of seizing the very first opportunity of earning a salary, however small, simply because he had never earned anything before, and allowed the notices to accumulate upon one end of his mantelpiece.
Finally he had recourse to his old College tutor, who advised him of a vacancy at Eaglescliffe, a great public school in the west of England, and by a timely private note to the Headmaster secured his appointment.
Next morning Arthur Robinson received from the directorate of the scholastic agency—the existence of which he had almost forgotten—a rapturous letter of congratulation, reminding him that the Agency had sent him notice of the vacancy upon a specified date, and delicately intimating that their commission of five per cent. upon the first year's salary was payable on appointment. Arthur, who had long since given up the task of breasting the Agency's morning tide of desirable vacancies, mournfully
investigated the heap upon the mantelpiece, and found that the facts were as stated. There lay the notice, sandwiched between a document relating to the advantages to be derived from joining the staff of a private school in North Wales, where material prosperity was guaranteed by a salary of eighty pounds per annum, and social success by the prospect of meat-tea with the Principal and his family; and another, in which a clergyman (retired) required a thoughtful and energetic assistant (one hundred pounds a year, non-resident) to aid him in the management of a small but select seminary for backward and epileptic boys.
Arthur laid the matter before his tutor, who informed him that he must pay up, and be a little less casual in his habits in future. He therefore wrote a reluctant cheque for ten pounds, and having thus painfully imbibed the first lesson that a schoolmaster must learn—namely, the importance of attending to details—departed to take up his appointment at Eaglescliffe.