Novels were strictly forbidden. A very handsome boy of eighteen from the Highlands was one day sitting in front of the school-room fire, basking in its heat and comfortably reading a novel called 'The Romance of War.' Our head-master stole in with cat-like tread in his noiseless slippers and looked over his shoulder. I was nearby at the time, and saw that book being slowly consumed in the red centre of the fire. We watched it till it was in ashes the head-master, myself, and the boy who owned it! Within twelvemonths that boy was fighting in the Crimea. He was one of five or six boys being prepared for the military entrance examination. None of them ever worked or were expected to work. They did, indeed, do some mysterious things with solid cubes, which meant, I suppose, instruction in methods of fortification. They always kept together and were considered wild and wicked.
In those far off days, travelling was expensive. My parents lived deep in the country, only to be reached by a four-horse coach, and Christmas holidays were short at all schools, at ours only ten days. Therefore we saw our families only once a year, during the summer holidays which lasted six weeks. My father, mother, sisters and all the countryside would exert themselves to give us a good time. The first week of that holiday was enjoyment without alloy. Such sudden happiness would admit companionship only with itself. After that came, like a creeping shadow, growing darker and denser, the ever-nearer approach of the day when we should have to return to school. Until the last week came, we brothers scattered, each bent upon his own particular enjoyment. When that week came, we went about together, made good companions by an identical mournfulness; and our mother was as sad as we were.
Is a boarding-school a good institution for any boy? Certainly it is a complete antidote to home influence, and is that desirable? A boarding-school develops selfishness. Every boy for himself. Does one acquire self-control? In such a school as mine the discipline from without was too searching and too constant for that other discipline from within to have a chance. When I left that school for good, I felt myself to be empty of morals. There was avoid within. The outer control had gone and it was a long time before the inner control grew up to take its place. My legacy from that school was a vivid and perfectly unconscious selfishness. From my short, far separated, loving holidays I carried away memories of affection and what it might be for me. And I think my history ever since has been the conflict between these two principles. But I was not self-indulgent.