Now let us all, both great and small,
With voice both loud and clear,
Right merrily sing, Live Billy our King!
For 'bating the tax upon beer.
For I likes my drop of good beer;
For I likes my drop of good beer.
So whene'er I goes out I carries about
My little pint bottle of beer.
To my taste the beer was very good, and not too strong. Perhaps it is a sign of the good sense of Wykehamists that they preferred water or milk.
One might also class fagging, with which all readers of Tom Brown are familiar, with the dead and dying customs. It is limited to a few simple offices. A Senior still sends small boys on errands, and sometimes makes him cook and wash bottles at private feasts in chambers. Every evening, too, when the post comes in, the porter of the college brings it to Chambers Court, and at a signal the junior of each chamber to get what belongs to his fellows. In olden times, in order to accustom the fags to handling hot dishes, the Seniors would sometimes score their hands with glowing fagots. This provided them with "tin gloves." A more amusing bit of barbarity was the "toe fittee," pronounced tofy-tie. This consisted in tying a string about a boy's great toe while he lay asleep. Then the string was violently pulled, and the boy was drawn out of his bed to his tormentor's side. Sometimes two or three would be brought from different parts of a chamber to the same point. In America I have often known a boy to tie a string about his own toe, and hang it out of the window so that a friend might wake him up to go out fishing; but that is a different thing.
For pure ingenuity the so-called "scheme" bears the palm. It was always the duty of a certain luckless Junior to wake the Prefect at an early hour every morning, and if he overslept he was of course tunded. Noticing that the night candle always burned to a certain point at this hour, some nameless fag invented the plan of hanging a hat-box over his head by a string, and connecting the string with this point of the candle by a rude fuse. He thus made sure that the hat-box would fall on his head at the required hour. Under this sword of Damocles he could, of course, sleep in peace without fear of flogging.
The terrible stories of flogging and fagging, however, really belong to the past. Unless I am very much mistaken, life at Winchester, in spite of an occasional tunding, is much pleasanter and better regulated than in most of our schools. The fact that the Prefects enforce most of the discipline makes it possible for the masters to get very near to the hearts of their pupils; and, above all, the English boys are fortunate in the fact that the wives and daughters of the Masters live with them in the same quadrangle. To speak of Winchester without telling about the wife of the second Head Master, and how fond of her big boys and little boys, good boys and bad boys are, would be to leave the part of Hamlet out of the play. Many are the gawky boys whom she has put at ease among people, and many the bad boys whom she has set right. One of the pleasantest things I saw at Winchester was a lot of Oxford men who had come back to her during vacation just to hear her call them Smith, Brown, and Robinson.
The stamp of men Winchester produces is as distinct from all others as a St. Paul's man is different from one from Exeter. The ideal toward which the school is working was well expressed by one of the Head Masters. "I consider that those boys who issue from the top of the school—i.e., those upon whom the highest influences of the school have been brought to bear—are boys who ... carry into life a stamp, not of a very showy kind, but distinguished by a self-reliance, a modesty, a practical good sense, and strong religious feeling—that religious feeling being of a very moderate traditional and sober kind which, in my judgment, is beyond all price."