The Loom of Youth

Books have their fates and this one's has been curious. I wrote it between January and March 1916, when I was seventeen and a half years old and in camp at Berkhamsted with the...

There comes some time an end to all things, to the good and to the bad. And at last Gordon Caruthers' first day at school, which had so combined excitement and depression as to...

The new boy's first week at a Public School is probably the most wretched he will ever pass in his life. It is not that he is bullied. Boots are not shied at him when he says hi...

Lovelace minor was speaking; it was the evening after the Dulbridge Match. The school had been beaten by twenty-seven points to three, by a much faster and heavier side. Meredit...

A small crowd had gathered in front of the studies on the first night of the Easter term. Consternation reigned. The almost impossible had happened. Lovelace major had passed in...

It was just after tea. Mansell was lying back in an easy-chair with his feet on the table; he was dead tired after a strenuous game. Gordon was sitting on the table. Hunter recl...

"Oh, I don't know. Why, only a quarter of an hour ago I came across Collins and Brown playing stump cricket in the cloisters instead of studying Thucydides. That's what I call k...

Generalisations are always apt to be misleading, but there was surely no truer one ever spoken than the old proverb: "When one is in Rome, one does as Rome does!" Parsons and go...

If Gordon were given the opportunity of living any single year over again, exactly as he had lived it before, he would in all probability have chosen his second year at Fernhurs...

During the Christmas holidays there appeared in a certain periodical one of the usual attacks on the Public School system. It repeated all the old arguments about keeping abreas...

After this match a new phase in Gordon's life may be said to have begun. He had for the first time felt what it was to be really successful. When he had got his Colts' cap the w...

As often as not, it is mere chance that provides the most essentially important moments in our lives. It is easy to talk of the inevitable march of Fate, but more usually a chan...

"Yet would you tread again All the road over? Face the old joy and pain-- Hemlock and clover? Yes. For it still was good, Good to be living, Buoyant of heart and blood; Fighting...

Miracles do not happen, nor do sudden conversions. Man very rarely changes. What he is at the beginning, he is at the end; all that occurs is that at various stages of his journ...

The tradition of Pack Monday Fair at Fernhurst is almost as old as the School House studies. The legend, whether authenticated or not only Macdonald, the historian of Fernhurst,...

Like a huge reel of thread the long winter term unrolled itself. November drifted by with its gusty winds that shrieked in the empty cloisters. December came with its dark morni...

There was only one thing that at all worried Gordon just now, and that was the behaviour of the Hazlitt brethren. Mention has already been made of this couple. During their firs...

The Two Cock was always played a fortnight after the Thirds, and during that fortnight the outhouses had to play off among themselves three preliminary rounds. For them it was a...

In the mud and the rain the School House Two Cock team, coming up early from a puntabout, joined the crowd watching the last stages of the Buller's _v._ Claremont's house match,...

On the Wednesday after the Games Committee's activities in the library, Ferrers banged into Betteridge's study, his arms laden with books. There was a Stoics meeting on the next...

The Three Cock came and went, bringing with it House caps for Lovelace, Collins and Fletcher, but it caused little stir. Everyone had foreseen the result, and without Hazelton (...

It is good to dream; but "Man proposes: God in His time disposes," and Gordon's dream was scattered at its dawn. Hardly a week later a great nation forgot its greatness, and Eur...

The same atmosphere of monotonous depression that overhung football soon began to affect the military side of school life as well. At first there had been the spur of novelty. T...

The Tonford match was a sad travesty of Fernhurst football. The school lost by over forty points. Gordon got his "Seconds," in company with nearly the entire Fifteen. He was not...

Slowly the Easter term moved on. As the days went by the sense of failure, which had overhung everything Gordon had done the term before, returned with an increased poignancy. T...

But the heart of youth is essentially fickle; and Gordon's lambent spirit, which had for some time almost ceased to strive for anything, suddenly swept round to the other extrem...

To Gordon this match seemed the ideal rounding off of his career. There had been no anti-climax, with him the best had come at the end. He would not have to look back and compar...