talker, amusing to the point seldom reached in conventional grownup life; a master of the English language' one sententious little fag called him. Shakspeare, after a break-up supper,' observed another contemporary,' would talk just like Tavender.' In fact, he was very Shaksperian, easily alternating the manner of Falstaff with that of Mark Antony. At meal-times we often noticed how other people, boys and masters alike (the latter with a pretended air of abstraction), would break off their own conversation to listen to what Tavender was saying. Similarly, when he brought his rug, with a few select friends, to look on at a 'house match' and lay upon the green sward, other groups would insensibly roll or draw nearer, and other 'chaff'—that indispensable condiment of the house match '—would pale before the Aristophanic badinage of Tavender & Co. But these attentions never caused him to display either vanity or embarrassment. The world was to him a stage, and existence a sort of carnival or masque into which the dullest and most compromising institutions and phenomena of school life soon learned to enter and play their parts.

It is probable that Tavender and his habitual associates in the halcyon days referred to did little scholastic work, keeping easily and artfully within reach of the bare minimum for which authority kept up an effective demand. But they were intensely active in other ways, and as fully occupied as the most industrious boys in the school.

I remember Grasswick, who now lectures on economics at Birmingham, positively averring to me that he distinctly remembered the sensation of going to bed, night after night, with jaws aching from laughter.' But when one asked him 'What at ?' he could only reply, 'Oh, Tavender,' and the reflection nearly set him off again.

The average school curriculum provides no very ample materials for mirth, but the individual referred to had a way of expanding and adapting the school regulations, partly from mere gaieté de cœur, partly from a natural desire to exhibit his superior acuteness in evading detection or consequences.'

This he did with remarkable success, even allowing for an almost inspired frankness of manner which inclined many authorities to stretch a point of logic or discipline in his favour. Besides, every one would have been sorry to lose him, as a unique institution, a sort of sacrosanct animal, while to his friends and companions—a large part of the irresponsible aristocracy of the school the question what Tavender had said or done yesterday, and

what he was likely to do or say to-morrow, formed the daily manna of recreation in the boundless desert of school work.

To all who had thus known him, it need hardly be said that his after-career and subsidence into a profession, success in which meant only dull industry followed by respectable longevity, was a severe disappointment.

It would have been more natural if he had vanished like Waring, to reappear as a blazing music-hall star, or a pirate king, or something romantic of that kind. As it was, one could not have recognised him as the same being. Indeed, there might have been a certain indecency in doing so. It is recorded, I believe, that on one or two occasions when conduct of unfathomably artful iniquity was being dragged to light in a certain court of justice, there dawned in the eye of Tavender, J., a gleam of what (if you had not known it to be the sternest judicial penetration') might have been mistaken for the admiring sympathy of a connoisseur.

A criminal of some swindling celebrity had once (according to an amusing paragraph in the newspaper reports) concluded the proceedings in his own case with the volunteered remark that he would have expected to meet Mr. Justice Tavender 'in another place.' To the perverted minds of such artists in deceit, while being 'removed in custody,' the acumen of the gentleman so unaccountably seated on the bench may have appeared a sort of hideous treachery. But if his schoolfellows found themselves deceived and disappointed by Tavender's collapse into dull respectability, many of our pastors and masters, on the other hand, had conceived the highest hopes of his future. This was particularly the case with the six or seven whose whole educational forces were, in theory at any rate, concentrated upon him during that first historic week at Whigbury.

Under the peculiar circumstances Tavender was inevitably rather petted and favoured. He dined out with all the masters in succession, and won golden opinions from all but the most cynical and suspicious. He had, as has been said, certain natural attractions, and, having spent some time at a good-sized grammar school, did not exhibit, except when playing the ingénu, the inexperienced childishness of an ordinary new boy. The influence Tavender thus acquired was undoubtedly of considerable use to him. For many of these masters never grasped Tavender's real nature and genius till many years later,

His histrionics were not of that kind that are taken up now and again for some particular petty end. He thought of the future, was always sowing the. good seed, so to speak, on the chance of some of it turning up trumps, and, in particular, preparing the minds of his juniors and others who trusted him for another and more entertaining world than that which is.

In plain English, Tavender was the brightest and 'sunniest' liar you ever saw. He would lie, with only a sheet of paper or a thin deal board between him and perdition, as circumspectly and sympathetically as any other boy would tell the truth to his mother. His figments were carefully compounded and tested by experiment (for which a school provided handy material) upon different degrees of intelligence, and the results carefully noted. Thus his simple juniors often lived for weeks in an atmosphere of unreality, the ultimate destruction of which by contact with the cold hard facts of life was like the smashing of a glass case around a carefully preserved specimen; and the business of undeceiving those who had come under the magic influence of Tavender provided philanthropic occupation for quite a number of dull but kindly elders. The winning suavity of his eloquence was far more remarkable than that of any we ever read of in ancient history-as, for example, when he persuaded Billiter, the new science master, that water could run uphill. That was really the net result, which made poor Mr. Billiter appear supremely ridiculous at the upper table next day; and it was entirely due to the simple and convincing naïveté with which Tavender described a machine they had used for years' in the fairyland which he located at home.' Again, almost every Whigbury boy, and to my certain knowledge half-a-dozen 'grown-ups,' passed through a stage in which they believed that the pillars in Whigbury chapel were made of pinchbeck. Their material was, of course, Purbeck marble. But when a lower boy first aired his newly acquired knowledge of this simple fact, Tavender's half paternal, half cynical laugh was a thing you could never forget. After that suggestive laugh the process of enlightenment followed a regular course-one coat of 'green' being allowed time to set before another was laid on, according to the hearer's intelligence and imaginative capacity-and usually concluded with its author's favourite dictum that there were only two other buildings like it' (Whigbury chapel) 'in Great Britain, one being the celebrated round church at Oxbridge, the other a ruined Anglo

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Saxon cathedral somewhere in Yorkshire.' In no other cases, it seemed, had this singular material been successfully employed in place of stone, although it was 'just as strong, and rather cheaper.'

But these are details. A curious characteristic of Tavender's, which has not been mentioned, was his knowledge of Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' which he constantly perused (I hope and believe in some Bowdlerised version), and from which it is said that he drew inspiration for some of his finer schemes for the inversion of the Actual and the substitution of the Surprising and the Improper.

It is certain that Tavender's most crushing reprobation of any rival plan proposed on the ground of its alleged inherent funniness took the form of the simple remark, 'That's not in the "Decameron"!' and many of us came to regard that justly famous work, perhaps not altogether without reason, as a sort of manual of practical joking. One or two masters who never heard of the trait till he had long passed from their control, positively opined that it threw a needful ray of light upon his most audacious misdeeds.

It was some two or three years after Tavender had, as he usually phrased it, founded the public school of Whigbury that the tragedy I am about to rehearse took place, what time the school had attained to a quite presentable size.

About this date there occurred a curious interregnum. The first head-master of Whigbury, after some difference with the trustees, and some wrangling as to the insufficiency of the notice given them, accepted a more lucrative position elsewhere. His successor, having been somewhat hurriedly selected, found that he could not, for some accidental and inevitable cause, present himself at the actual date of the commencement of his office.

In consequence one of the elder masters was appointed locum tenens for the 'term,' a term destined to become famous as the most disorderly and licentious ever enjoyed or abused by any schoolboys at any public school, and familiarly known to all Whigburians of that epoch as Tavender's last term.'

Years afterwards old stagers' of the school, questioned by novices as to the date of some historic defiance of authority, some traditional high-water mark of indolence or insubordination, would be sure to answer, 'That was in Tavender's last term' or 'in Tavender's term.' The latter sobriquet was, of course, a mere abbreviation of the former, accentuated and justified to our young minds by the fact that the individual referred to did during that

period come to a head, so to speak, and 'flourish' as distinctively as any English monarch during the period usually assigned to him or her in a chart of history.

He occupied, indeed, no official position beyond that of chairman to a private debating society (founded, needless to say, by himself), admission to which was eagerly coveted by Fifth-form boys, seeing that subjects of the most preposterously unacademic nature were there secretly discussed with a gravity worthy of the Royal Society.

Besides these and other amusements, Tavender was a fair proficient at most games; carried on two or three small trades (one being the manufacture of horoscopes, for which he evolved a temporary 'rage '), and distinguished himself as a fluent writer of Latin verse, especially other people's. He would knock you off a couple of sets of 'elegiacs '—the 'Cuckoo,' for example, or 'Home they brought '-for the Lower Sixth and the Middle Fourth respectively, adapting the mistakes to the intelligence of each particular supposititious author and the acumen of his form master with unerring taste and judgment. These and other popular virtues were rehearsed, when Tavender left at the close of that celebrated term, by an orator (since become a statesman of repute), who summed up by observing that 'nothing in his (Tavender's) career, not even its singular commencement, became him like the ending of it,' a remark which the reader will understand better presently.

If he had not 'left,' it is very possible (seeing that his numerous avocations rendered school work almost out of the question) that his guardian (he had no parents living) might have been invited to remove him. The unsatisfactory condition of the school was undoubtedly the fault of the staff. I say undoubtedly, because it always must be so, not because Tavender always asserted it, for he had somehow a poor opinion of schoolmasters as a class.

'I never learnt nothink o' them,' he once observed while coming down the steps of the Senate House at Oxbridge after being blackballed,' as he chose to put it, in an important university examination. The things I've found out for myself would fill a book, but,' he added with a sigh, it would be suppressed directly.' The simple fact is that the first 'head' of Whigbury, a very able scholar, had rather failed as a disciplinarian.

Thus the term started with the strings of law and order in a relaxed condition.