Page:My Life and Loves.djvu/64

38 I felt myself an outcast and was utterly lonely and miserable as only despised outcasts can be. I was sure, too, I should be expelled and knew my father would judge me harshly; he was always on the side of the authorities and masters. However, the future was not to be as gloomy as my imagination pictured it.

The Mathematical Master was a young Cambridge man of perhaps six and twenty, Stackpole by name: I had asked him one day about a problem in algebra and he had been kind to me. On returning to the school this fatal afternoon about six, I happened to meet him on the edge of the playing field and by a little sympathy he soon drew out my whole story.

"I want to be expelled. I hate the beastly school", was my cry. All the charm of the Irish schools was fermenting in me: I missed the kindliness of boy to boy and of the masters to the boys; above all the imaginative fancies of fairies and "the little people" which had been taught us by our nurses and though only half believed in; yet enriched and glorified life,—all this was lost to me. My head in especial, was full of stories of Banshees and fairy queens and heroes, half due to memory, half to my own shaping, which made me a desirable companion to Irish boys and only got me derision from the English.

"I wish I had known that you were being fagged". Stackpole said when he had heard all, "I can easily remedy that", and he went with me to the schoolroom and then and there erased my name from the fags' list and wrote in my name in the First Mathematical Division.

"There", he said with a smile, "you are now in the Upper School where you belong. I think", he added, "I had better go and tell the Doctor what