I leaped the brook and scattered the sleeping birds out of the bushes up the banks. "Ho for the sea! Hurrah!" I cried; and I never turned to give even a farewell look at the Château de Belair.
[to be continued.]
[TYPICAL ENGLISH SCHOOLS.]
BY JOHN CORBIN.
RUGBY.
Rugby was founded in 1567, almost two hundred years later than Winchester. Its founder was not a great bishop and statesman, like Wykeham, and much less a King, like the founder of Eton, but plain Lawrence Sheriff, one of the gentlemen of the Princess Elizabeth (afterward Queen Bess), and a warden of the Grocers' Company. At first Rugby was a mere grammar-school; and it never ranked high as a public school until Dr. Thomas Arnold, "The Doctor" of Tom Brown's School-Days, became head master. To-day Rugby holds firmly to its middle-class traditions. There is not a title in the whole place. The boys are mainly the sons of midland manufacturers, and of the doctors and lawyers of the neighboring cities.
When Dr. Arnold came to Rugby in 1837 he found about as unruly and turbulent a school as there was in the kingdom. The "houses" were mere boarding-houses, and the masters, who usually eked out their incomes by means of church "livings," often resided at some vicarage or rectory in the neighborhood. Arnold, who was an old Wykehamist, required the masters to live in the houses and govern them, as the Winchester masters have always done. Next to the masters in authority he placed the sixth-form boys, giving them much the same powers as the Winchester prefects and Eton captains. When there are not enough sixth-form boys to keep order in a house, as sometimes happens, the master selects a few of the best scholars and athletes in the fifth form, and gives them the power and responsibility of sixth-form boys. Instead of gathering all the "scholars" together in one "college," as is done at Winchester and Eton, each house has a fair proportion of scholars. This plan is followed at Harrow also; and, as I mentioned in the first of these articles, the college at Winchester is likely soon to be broken up and scattered among the houses. As a result of this plan the Rugby "school-house"—of which Tom Brown was a member—is made up not of a picked set of scholars, but of the same proportion of scholars and other boys as the houses.
THE SCHOOL-HOUSE QUADRANGLE—SHOWING TOM BROWN'S CLOCK TOWER.