64 "MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE!" 



sharp, fiery eye, which boded no good for those against 

 whom he from time to time fulminated. If he did not 

 box your ears, which he was very apt to do, with rapid 

 persistency and both hands, he had a way of sending 

 you to buy a cane for your own chastisement. This was 

 rather a refinement of what would be now termed cruelty, 

 but it at least gave the chance to purchase the worst 

 possible cane, and even to insert a hair in it to make it 

 split. Somehow and it has always been a mystery to 

 me why I never incurred his wrath, or, at any rate, 

 the practical demonstration of it. I had a charmed life, 

 so to speak, and a proof of this was given when some 

 ballyragging and pillow-fighting was taking place in a 

 dormitory which others, of whom I was one, had invaded, 

 and Mr Furness suddenly rushed in with a big shilling 

 cane and Berserker wrath in his eyes. He laid about 

 him with right good will on boys who, with only night- 

 shirts on, were badly cut under really savage blows. 

 In the course of his onrush he came upon me and I stood 

 to receive the worst that cane could do, but he paused for 

 a moment and said : " No, I won't hit you ! " and dashed 

 on, doing apparently indiscriminate punishment among 

 all the others. I never learned why it was that I was 

 spared, and I simply record the fact that I was. 



It was a good sort of school as schools were in those 

 times. There were four forms in it, the IVth being the 

 highest, and I was provisionally put in the Illrd, the 

 master of which was named Lewis, but though coming in 

 at the half term, I was soon able to outclass the company 

 in which I found myself, and having won a prize, Sir 

 Walter Scott's Poems, which I still possess and value, 

 I proceeded into the IVth form the next term. 



Oakfield House is still well known as a preparatory 

 school for Rugby, and it has always been a good one. 

 There you began to understand what Rugby football really 

 was. It needed some understanding, for those were the 

 days of the hacking game, when not only could you hack 

 your way through a scrummage but hack over whoever 



