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I appeared to have wandered inadvertently into the midst of a private quarrel, one party to which the one standing a couple of yards from me with a loaded revolver in his hand was evidently a man of impulse, the sort of man who would shoot first and inquire afterwards. 'I'm Mr Burns, I said. 'I'm one of the assistant-masters. Who are you? 'Mr Burns? Surely that rich voice was familiar.
The college was a square brick building, not handsome, but commodious; and in the same enclosure with it were the head-master's house, and a boarding-house in which the assistant-masters lived with the pupils. With that love of grand terms which a new country is apt to evince, the head-master was called "The Principal," and his assistants "Professors."
We descended the stairs and began to do our best, in our respective styles, to produce order. It was not an easy task. Small boys are always prone to make a noise, even without provocation. When they get a genuine excuse like the incursion of men in white masks, who prod assistant-masters in the small of the back with Browning pistols, they tend to eclipse themselves.
Oscar Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton, because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a boarding-house; and that there are great dangers in cramming little boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great value to their parents; and, again, that the manufacture and supply of school-books, in England, much needs regulation by some competent authority.
After evening prayers, read by one of the assistant-masters, for the Doctor did not appear again, we were enjoined to go up to our bedrooms with as little noise as possible, and we had been in bed some time before Sutcliffe, the old butler, came up as usual to put out the lights.
'It's absolutely necessary that I should be here. 'And that I should. She considered me for a moment. 'Mrs Attwell told me that you were one of the assistant-masters at the school. 'I am acting as assistant-master. I am supposed to be learning the business. She hesitated. 'Why? she said. 'Why not? 'But but you used to be very well off. 'I'm better off now. I'm working.
It was almost as if Mr Abney had realized intuitively how excellent the discipline of work was for my soul, for the kindly man allowed me to do not only my own, but most of his as well. I have talked with assistant-masters since, and I have gathered from them that headmasters of private schools are divided into two classes: the workers and the runners-up-to-London.
It is my belief that, if assistant-masters were allowed to wear white masks and carry automatic pistols, keeping order in a school would become child's play. A silence such as no threat of bad marks had ever been able to produce fell instantaneously upon the classroom.
Here one of the assistant-masters took charge of us, placing `Ugly' and `Rattlebrains, as I had mentally christened my two companions, along with myself at a table in a corner of the room, away from the rest of the boys, some three hundred odd in number, who were all busy at their lessons.
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