THE BEUECGOAT SCHOOL,

ends of boy looking for all the world like some wild scrimmage of storks,
with their lively cheerful-colored legs in fullest evidence. Their knee-breeches
are of dark-blue; they wear a narrow red leather belt, and the white “ bands”
instead of a collar, shaped like those of the French clergy to-day; bands which
the English clergy dropped several generations ago. The coats, also dark-blue,
have skirts falling all around, as low as the ankle, and when a boy wants some
fun, he has to bundle up yards of unwieldy cloth behind ; which adds, you may
be sure, to the queerness of his general appearance. Sometimes he is so happy
as to possess a jersey for play-hours, and a cap no bigger than the palm of your
hand, which he may put on in the street, if he chooses, but which he never does
choose, even in mid-winter. The little Blues, with their long yellow legs and
browned faces, cannot fail to make a curious picture to the modern eye;
and everybody must stop to watch them, and smile, and sigh, and wish to be
twelve years old again, with no worse vexation than a lesson in Cesar, and no
future anxiety beyond the winning of a game! As you look at them from
their front gates, the gray height of the glorious Hall of the school confronts
you; beyond, and to your left, is the
four-pinnacled tower of the old church
where Captain John Smith is buried ;
to your right are Smithfield, Little Brit-
ain, and the storied neighborhood of
St. Bartholomew’s, where the Jacobean
gables elbow the more precious Norman
masonry ; and the melancholy highway
where you stand shows you the grim
prison, almost opposite this area, over-
flowing with youth and blameless joy.
Once you are within the Bluecoat pre-
cincts, you become conscious of the
near overhanging dome of St. Paul’s,
which, when viewed from the doors of
the Writing School, seems to fill the
whole horizon and sky, and sustain you,
like an eternal thing. But changes
come, even here; and not very long
after you read these few pages, Christ
Hospital may be sold or leveled, its

 

THE STATUE OF THE FOUNDER, . f ]
(ine thy ene maner VT) laws altered, and its army of nearly

eight hundred boys transferred to the

‘country, away from the sad town which will be lonely without their eyes and
‘voices and eccentric hose, familiar here for three hundred and fifty years.

The many buildings are not all ancient. Little remains of those considered