THE BLUECOAT SCHOOL.

time, and the jolly crowd stops short, abandons its bats, hockey-sticks,
balls, and roller-skates, lets down its coat-tails, and falls into squads and com-
panies, preceded by a dozen of the more musical youngsters, who have or-
ganized a very creditable brass band; and so, left, right, left, away they march
from the wind and the sun, until the last straight little soldier is swallowed
up in the dark arches and disappears. They have a beautiful library, a muscum,
a picture-gallery, a gymnasium (with a splendid swimming-bath in which the
boundary-lines of three parishes converge), and several wide cool cloisters for

 

OUTSIDE THE GREAT HALL, AT DINNER-TIME.

playgrounds in hot or wet weather. At their doors is Christ Church, where the
innumerable family kneels on Sunday at Morning Prayer and Evensong. Clus-
tered about the great Hall are more chambers and dwellings than would go to
make a sizable village, and in these live the warden, the professors, the kind old
steward, and the society of domestics; all in their offices striving and succeed-
ing, to make the Bluecoat School very dear to the Blues.

Although the pupils pay nothing for what is, in the American sense, a
thorough and excellent public-school education (for a “public school” in Eng-
land, as you know, means something far more lordly and exclusive) you are not
to infer that the boys are mere paupers and hoodlums. Dependent they must
be; but if the fathers of any of them earn a thousand dollars (two hundred pounds)