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rough one now. The only washing-place was a room on 

 the ground floor, with sinks and leaden basins in them, to 

 which we came down in the morning to wash our hands 

 and faces. There was very little taught but mathematics 

 for the army boys, and classics for those destined for 

 Haileybury, the East India Company's college for the 

 Indian Civil Service. Copley Fielding taught some boys 

 drawing and water-colour painting. There was also a 

 French class, presided over by a poor little old French- 

 man, M. Dell. I never in my life met a being to whom 

 the term " master " was less applicable. The French 

 master at the schools of sixty years ago was not a happy 

 person. He was despised of all men and boys, and his 

 position was one of such inferiority that no man of any 

 power or spirit was likely to fill it. Stoton allowed no 

 prize for the French class, and it has been one of the 

 most touching incidents of my life that the poor old 

 Frenchman gave me a little prize which he paid for 

 himself. It was a small edition of Florian's fables. I had 

 it with me for years, but where it has gone to now I know 

 not. It is perhaps buried somewhere among the increased 

 belongings that inheritances and a settled life have accumu- 

 lated about me ; I wish I could find it again. Augustus 

 and I were probably the only boys that had been in 

 France, and certainly the only ones with any pretension 

 to speaking French, and I think the good little man had 

 a predilection for us among the crowd of sneering John 

 Bulls hating him, his language, and his country that it 

 was his hard fate to teach. It would be a great delight 

 if I could perform an anachronistic miracle and find him 

 as he then was, to give him a hundred times the value of 

 his poor little book. 



'From Stoton's, at the age of fourteen, I went to the 

 Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and Augustus must 

 have gone to the Military Academy at Woolwich about a 



