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ETON CORRESPONDENCE.

A HOUSE-MASTER'S DIARY, 1910.

(If the Faddists have their Way.)

May 5.-The boys have returned. The annexe for valets will be taxed to its utmost capacity, but after all it is my own idea and a much better one than allowing servants to live in rooms or in low public-houses in the town. Valets will be valets.

May 8.-Everything is going swimmingly, a vulgar but expressive phrase. DICKENSON Major, who is head of my house, was quite nice about the threecourse luncheon, only he suggested that there should always be sweets. He quite agreed with me that ten o'clock was early enough for breakfast. Very wise of him, as boys cannot really have too much sleep.

May 15.-Wife much distressed by an angry letter from Sir JOHN MILLDOM, complaining that his son, who is by no manner of means an athlete, has been given chicken for dinner twice during the past week. Wrote myself to point out that it is a most difficult thing to provide a complete change of diet during the close season for game. (Mem. See the chef.)

May 22. Have been annoyed by considerable rowdiness of some of the junior members of my house. The trouble arose from the absence of DICKENSON Major and a few of his friends. Had not their absence been absolutely imperative I think I should almost have refused them leave. However, they all motored to town yesterday, and I scarcely know when they will be back. DICKENSON assured me that his valet had shaved him carelessly on Sunday morning, while the crease in STEINHAUSEN's trousers was neither distinct nor regular. Something. of course, had to be done. They will return when they have found suitable servants, and then, perhaps, the house! will be quieter. A house-master's life is full of anxiety.

June 13.-A third letter from Dr. HENLEIGH complaining of his son's spelling. (Mem. I must pass these letters on to his tutor.)

July 16.-House much disorganised by magnificent successes in the field and on the river. DICKENSON Major and JONES are disinclined to breakfast before eleven, which throws back the hour for luncheon. HARRISON and LEE Minor will insist on getting up at eight o'clock, at their tutor's suggestion. I have written to their parents.

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Vicar's Daughter (meeting one of her class). "WELL, JANE, I HEAR YOU VE JUST BEEN TO LONDON. YOUR FIRST VISIT, WASN'T IT?"

Jane. "YES, MISS."

Vicar's Daughter. "AND WHERE DID YOU STAY?"

Jane. "AT MY SISTER'S, MISS."

Vicar's Daughter. "AND WHAT PART OF LONDON IS THAT?
Jane. "NEXT DOOR TO THE DOCTOR'S, MISS!"

(before dinner). DICKENSON Major was and every valet will have to speak at
annoyed to-day because his tonic was least two modern languages before he is
taken out to him while batting against qualified. We can then smile at Com-
the M.C.C., but I do not see what else I
could have done.

pulsory Greek. Other masters may disagree with me, but I can also afford to smile at them. Pioneers are never popular.

August 15.-Been reading Tom Brown's Schooldays. Tempora mutantur et nos...

July 25.-How different things are from what they used to be. Letter from an old boy saying that since he had left he has discovered that prison fare is more nutritious than the food he was given July 20.-As term draws to a close, when at school here. He added that and all of us-masters, boys, and valets prisoners-even the most culpable-are -feel exhausted, I have introduced a allowed to sleep longer than he was. thus: system of tonics. "Tonics" may become To-day we have changed all that, and historic. The hours at present are next term I shall have enlarged the 10.30 (before breakfast), 3.30 and 8.30 annexe. Every boy will have his valet,

VOL. CXXVIII.

A DUBLIN grocer advertises his butter

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A CAMBRIDGE BEDMAKER.

it being understood, of course, that the broken heart was that of her Grace. What happened to the lowly wife was not recorded. THERE came to me the other day from Cambridge a Of all her masters, in their relation to Mrs. HUGGINS-they memorial card, decently bordered with lines of silver and used to summon her by the affectionate and familiar abbreblack, which brought the distressing information that viation of "BELLA "--it may be said that, whether they were ARABELLA HUGGINS (for by that name I shall call her) had lords or commoners, they reached their full glory in her eyes died at the great age of 84. Her relations and those who only after they had left Cambridge. While they resided in mourned her departure were bidden by an appropriate text College their names were generally classed by their bonnetto resign themselves to the inscrutable decrees of Providence. wearing guardian in an order of merit corresponding with Mrs. HUGGINS was not of those who clatter through the some exactness to their hospitality and the recklessness of pages of history. No boast of heraldry or pomp of power their behaviour. Those who gave dinner-parties were certain was hers, and neither storied urn nor animated bust will of her favour. If, in addition, they defied the College mark the place where, after many years of faithful service, authorities, they basked in a perpetual sunshine of approval. she now rests. Her lot in life was humble, but it had been On the other hand, she professed an impatience amounting eminently useful, for she belonged by birth, inheritance and almost to dislike of those who, ordering nothing from the a considerable training to the ancient guild (if I may so kitchens, sustained nature on potted meats, or received condescribe it) of bedmakers of Cambridge. For more years signments of eggs from the country to the detriment of the than I can number she had ministered to the wants of those local grocers. Yet even these, on returning years afterwards youths who were appointed to dwell on one of the staircases to the scenes of their youth, would be told that things had of the Old, or Great, Court of Trinity College, the Court of sadly altered since their own great and memorable days; which EDWARD THE THIRD (tertius Edvardus famâ super that hospitality, so profusely practised by them, was now a æthera notus"), HENRY THE EIGHTH and Queen ELIZABETH are lost art; that deans and tutors were allowed to have matters the tutelary monarchs. Here are the Hall and the Chapel, their own way instead of having to fight, as they used to, for and in the centre rises the beautiful fountain rich with an uncertain supremacy; and that, in fact, Cambridge was delicate tracery. Amidst these scenes of venerable splendour not, and never could be again, what it had been. Once, Mrs. HUGGINS carried on her duties. when the mildest-mannered man that ever kept a chapel or refused to cut a lecture brought his wife to Cambridge she assured him, in the presence of the lady, that she still remembered, and would ever remember, the night on which, having dined with twenty others, "all in scarlet coats and most of 'em under the table," he had hurled imprecations at the junior dean from the middle of the grass-plot. Then, taking the wife aside, she loudly whispered some words of counsel in her ear, begging her as she valued her happiness and her life, "not to cross that man." The lady smiled; the husband beamed with an air of conscious devilry; Mrs. HUGGINS alone was perfectly serious.

Of these she had, like all the more distinguished bedmakers, no mean conception. She paid a proper attention to the strictly lectificent parts of her profession, but she by no means confined herself to them; for she could lay a cloth with neatness and set out a breakfast or a lunch table with unvarying success. She made the tea strong and of a good healthy brown tint, for she scorned the effeminacy of the less highly-coloured leaves; and for those masters whom she delighted to honour she was always willing to compose a dish of buttered eggs. She has even been known to bring a savoury beef-steak pudding, her own domestic manufacture, into College under her shawl, and to produce it steaming for the enjoyment of her undergraduates. All she asked on these occasions was that no scrap should be left in the bowl, and this easy tribute to her skill and benevolence was always duly paid. Then, when the table had been cleared and the room prepared for reading, she would seek and receive the small encouragement that was necessary to cause her to open the great storehouse of her experience, and bring forth from it treasures of gossip and anecdote matched only in the pages of DICKENS. When that was over she took her shawl from its peg, her basket from its mysterious hiding-place, and so proceeded homeward.

Mrs. HUGGINS always retained and displayed a high respect for those distinctions of rank on which our social order is founded. A bedmaker in the adjoining Nevile's Court she considered, and often treated, as an equal; to a bedmaker of the New Court she extended a patronage which was not without pity; but no power on earth could have brought her to admit that a bedmaker whose sphere of work lay in the Master's Court was entitled to a precedence even of the humblest kind. She was once asked by an undergraduate to attend a prayer-meeting in the suburb of Barnwell, but she excused herself with the dignity that never deserted her. "How was I to know," she said afterwards, "that some o' them people I met there mightn't come calling on me at my home next day?" It was an unanswerable assertion of selfrespecting exclusiveness.

In the course of her career she had associated on terms of familiarity with many who possessed titles, and of these she always spoke with a becoming reverence. One mysterious peer, indeed, there seems to have been, who, as an undergraduate, married a bedmaker's daughter, "and took away the title from his sister, the Duchess, pore dear, and broke 'er 'eart,"

Of KING EDWARD THE SEVENTH she always spoke with a loyalty both frank and venerating. She remembered him as an undergraduate, and was wont to declare that as he walked across the Court or came into a room there shone from the corner of his eye a look that suggested cheerfulness while it inspired confidence.

For London she had but a scant respect. The porters at its railway stations, she said, permitted a passenger who was bound for Cambridge to take a seat in a train destined to arrive at Kew; its lodgings were disgraced by the presence of what she called "live-stock"; while its streets lacked the sparkling streams which beautify those of Cambridge. On the other hand she appreciated very highly the courtesy of a Drury Lane audience which, she related, had risen at her entrance and saluted her with cheers, evidently knowing who she was and whence she came.

Of the instruments of science she had an ineradicable suspicion. Chancing to see a theodolite in Jesus Lane she waited half an-hour and then urged the surveyor to get his shooting done quickly, seeing that honest folks wanted to go to their work. On being told afterwards that he who looked through such an instrument saw people upside down she expressed a great horror, asserting that no mortal man should with her own consent behold her with her clothes flying over her head.

May she rest in peace. To those whose rooms she tidied and to whose wants in sickness or in health she attended with unfaltering zeal she will always stand as the great exemplar of all that a bedmaker should be, for she was faithful, industrious, warm in friendship, comfortable and kindly in her ministrations, and of an honesty far beyond the reach of envious tongues. Those who follow after will do well to imitate her virtues. R. C. L.

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Jimmy who has several times asked his mother, who is busy, to get him something from upstairs). "MUMMY, DEAR, IF YOU'RE AFRAID

OF THE DARK, I'LL GO UP WITH YOU!'

that he is of colonial extraction--White- cance of her act. She was imperially
chapel, I believe.)
intoxicated, and was making the noblest
My second-born, ADOLPHULA, whose immolation of her ego to the fumes of
wailings I had unhesitatingly stigma- Imperialism.

IMPERIALISM: ITS PRICE. MR. PUNCH, SIR,-I have just read in a worthy publication a critique of the views of Dr. EMIL REICH, an eminent tised as unearthly, was instantly absolved. Sir, such a thought is inspiring it Hungarian, who says that Imperialism She was the voice of Imperialism. Again, gives furiously to think (a quotation degrades and unsexes women. I was when I considered the love of gossip from the same local poet). What a debt of appalled he seemed to have behind exhibited by my patient MARIA, I had to gratitude do we owe to such an intellect! him the authority of the Reichstag. admit that she was a mere counter in However angry we may feel, we cannot The truth, as a local poet observes, is a the hands of Imperialism: her remarks but recognise in all disasters the hand stranger to fiction. My imaginings had were imperially unseasonable. JANE of Imperialism, and with bowed heads been indeed astray. Incidents which I the housemaid, who is perpetually acquiesce in its manifold manifestations. had regarded as nugatory assumed an breaking articles de vertu, had to be SUBURBANUS. imperial significance. I reflected upon acquitted of wilful negligence: it is the ADOLPHA my first-born, and was astounded. price she has to pay for my Imperialism. What I had thought mere perversity (I may say incidentally that I should FROM THE PROSPECTUS OF A NEW MARKED and narrowness of view (she is over have been relieved if she had also paid TESTAMENT.-"The advantage of such eight years of age) became protracted the price of the crockery.) Even the markings is undoubted, to serve into dim infinity. Her attempts to flirt cook is no clog on the wheels of Im- finger-posts to those who are but little with the gardener's son were justified. perialism. Twice have we found her acquainted with their Bibles. MissionIt was the price she had to pay for my intoxicated before an important dinner aries and Evangelists will find the book Imperialism it was a deliberate en- party. We were then foolishly annoyed. invaluable." Rather hard deavour to flirt imperially. (I may say We did not understand the true signifi- Missionaries and Evangelists.

:

Yours, &c.,

as

on the

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