green still, though they budded when Norman strove with Saxon, ere Saxon had done his strife with Briton. Nor can I now forbear one thought, for it is forced on me: if ever we are disposed to contrast bygone ages unfavourably with our own, we may ask ourselves whether we think the systems we have arranged, the wheels we have just seen begin to turn, will run as freely, will work as adaptably to the needs of seven hundred years to come, as the great institution of the past moves now when seven hundred years have passed over it, age after age, ready to become young again? Yes, we may say if ours too is built on humanity's best, on a true perception of humanity's needs, on a devout humility and eager acceptance of God's work in man and through man. But not otherwise; not if we mistake troubled rills for fountains, and seek our immortality on earth, and hold doubt to be more wise and strong than faith.

If we build into the same building and trust the same corner-stone, we shall stand like them and share their strength: for life is one and indivisible, and so shall we be part of the Living Temple of God.

So shall your hearts beat strong with energy, yet be cool through self-restraint; and your work be wrought with diligence and rendered with cheerfulness; and your faces be bright with modesty, yet bold with frankness; and the grasp of your hands be firm and generous. For you will be men. You will seek Purity, that the souls and bodies you offer to those you love and to all-seeing God may be white and unspotted; Truth, that your speech may be simple and clear; Love, that your friendships may be sound, and that the brotherhood of men may be to you no shadow. But that these things may be, you must fix eye and heart unflinchingly on Christ and His Reproach; you must adore it, you must achieve it, for there is no treasure like the Reproach of Christ, understood and loved and lived.

Young as I was it affected me almost to tears and there were many wet eyes in chapel. After the evening service-it was a hot summer night with sharp little restless gusts of wind-the school waited in the Quadrangle to say goodbye to him: contrary to the ordinary usage at schools, it was the custom at Wellington for the Headmaster to remain in his stall till the boys had all

gone out, and then lead the masters out; he waited for us, my mother, brothers and myself, in the antechapel, where he shook hands silently with several of his old colleagues. The whole of the cloister was lined with boys, many of whom put out their hands silently to be shaken. My father walked along with quick steps, his surplice and hood swayed by the wind which blew in through the grilles of the cloister, his face streaming with tears. In the court he was cheered by a crowd of boys; he smiled and waved his hand; at the door by the Master's library leading out towards the Lodge, as he unlocked it, a number of Prefects who were gathered there pressed forwards. "Goodbye, my dear, dear fellows," he said falteringly; and as we went out into the dusk I remember a cry of "God bless you, sir."

CHAPTER XI.

LINCOLN.

"Dixit nunquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus.”

CICERO.

THE Chancery at Lincoln is one of the most beautiful houses it has ever been my lot to live in. It shows a rather inconspicuous front of Tudor red-brick on the street, with a large oriel window, and a great double door of ancient oak, in which we found embedded the bullets of the Commonwealth. You enter a long low hall from which a staircase leads up to a stately lobby; this admits to a beautiful panelled drawing-room overlooking the Close, and haunted by a tapping ghost. In the corner of the drawing-room is an ancient winding stair with pentacles on the steps to ward off devils. The house is very large, so large that my brother and I were given a sitting-room, called Bec by my father, after Anthony de Bec, one of his famous predecessors and afterwards the military Bishop of Durham. The house extends far back from the Close: there is a part of a fifteenth-century screen of oak in the wall of what was our schoolroom, formerly the chapel1: there, too, an awmry was discovered on removing the wall-paper: a hagioscope from what was the solar; and by the servants' hall there are three ancient

1 Canon Leeke made further discoveries, including a piscina, in 1899.