Aranjuez and Eton 



Aranjuez, and return by rail, to take the direct diligence, 

 after all. 



So we made the best of our unfortunate experiment, and 

 loitered about among the gardens, and pleasure-grounds, 

 and groves, discoursing peripatetic philosophy on many 



subjects, but chiefly education ; apropos of B having 



that morning received a letter, calling him up to Eton, as a 

 master. 



To me — leaving Eton as a little boy of fourteen, and 

 sealing up, as one always does, my memories of the place as 

 I left it, without allowance for changes moving on unseen — 

 it seemed strange, and a sudden accession of great age to 

 myself, to find a boy of the form below me all at once 

 become one of those dreaded potentates — vicegerents of 

 Jupiter himself — wrapped in a rustling cloud of dignity and 

 black silk. 



To B , however, who had grown up at Eton, and 



known some slight foretaste of his present responsibilities 

 as a sixth-form boy, and still more as captain of the school — 

 who had lived with present masters as companions, both at 

 Eton and King's — the appointment suggested a long future 

 of patient drudgery, among troublesome little boys, con- 

 trasted with the happy recollections of his own school days. 



We consoled him over his good fortune (for you must 

 know that an Eton mastership is a very comfortable thing 

 in many points of view, and all good fortune has its draw- 

 backs), by placing his profession in the most poetical light 

 we could. While he and Harry sat on a magnificently 

 carved but dampish marble bench, I, who was afraid it 

 might, as the phrase is, strike cold if I sat down, stood 

 before them, and delivered something like the following- 

 charge, whose intermittent pauses in the cigar-pufF were 

 taken up by the bubbling murmurs of that quaintly-graven 



293 



